Whereas 1—1 crossed that Caspium once or twice. When I was either eighteen or nineteen, or maybe twenty. When—1 am tempted to say—you were in Athens, learning your Greek. In those days, the distance between Caspium and Hellas, not to mention Rome, was in a sense even greater than it was two thousand years ago; it was, frankly, insurmountable. So we didn't meet. The mare itself was smooth and shiny, near its western shores especially. Thanks not so much to the propitious proximity to civilization as to vast oil spills, perennial in those parts. (I could say this was the real case of pouring oil upon troubled waters, but I am afraid you wouldn't catch the reference.) I was lying flat on the hot upper deck of a dirty steamer, hungry and penniless, but happy all the same, because I was participating in geography. When you are going by boat you always do. Had I read by that time your piece to Rufus, I would have realized that I was also participating in poetry. In a dactyl rather than in a sharpening horizon.
But in those days I wasn't that much of a reader. In those days I was working in Asia: mountain climbing and desert trekking. Prospecting for uranium, basically. You don't know what that stufl' is, and I won't bore you with an explanation, Flaccus. Although "uranium" is another dactylic word. What does it feel like to learn a word you cannot use? Especially —for you—a Greek one? Awful, I suppose; like, for me, your Latin. Perhaps ifl were able to operate in it confidently, I could indeed conjure you up. On the other hand, perhaps not: I'd become for you just another Latin author, and that is a recipe for hiatus.
In any case, in those days I'd read none of you, except—if my memory doesn't play tricks on me—Virgil, i.e., his epic. I remember that I didn't care for it much, partly because against that backdrop of mountains and deserts few things managed to make sense; mainly because of the epic's rather sharp smell of commission. In those days, one's nostrils were very keen for that sort of thing. Besides, I simply couldn't make out 99 percent of his exempla, which were getting in the way rather frequently. What do you expect from an eighteen-year-old from Hyperborea? I am better with this sort of thing now, but it's taken a lifetime. On the whole, it seems to me that you all were overdoing it a bit with the references; they often strike one as filler. Although euphonically of course they—the Greek ones especially— do marvels for the texture.
What rattled me perhaps most in the Aeneid was that retroactive prophecy of Anchises, when the old man predicts what has already taken place. Here, I thought, your friend went a bit too far. I don't mind the conceit, but the dead should be allowed to be more imaginative. They ought to know more than just Augustus' pedigree; after all, they are not oracles. What a waste of that stunning, mind-boggling idea about souls being entitled to a second corporeality and lapping from the river Lethe to cleanse themselves of their previous memories! To reduce them to paving the road for the reign of the current master! Why, they could become Christians, Charlemagnes, Diderots, Communists, Hegels, us! Those who will come after, mongrels and mutants, and in more ways than one! That would be a real prophecy, a real flight of fancy. Instead, he rehashes the official record and serves it as hot news. The dead are free of causality, to begin with. The knowledge available to them is that about time—all time. That much he could have learned from Lucretius; your friend was a learned man. More than that, he had a terrific metaphysical instinct, a real nose for things' spiritual lining: his souls are far less physical than Dante's. True manes: gaseous and unpalpable. One is tempted to say his scholasticism here is practically medieval. But that would be a put-down. Because metaphysically your future turned out to be far less imaginative than your Greek past. For what is life eternal to a soul compared with a second corporeality? What is Paradise to it after the Pythagorean promise of another body? Just unemployment. Still, whatever his sources were—Pythagoras, Plato's Phaedrus, his own fancy—he blows it all for the sake of Caesar's lineage.
Well, the epic was his; he had the right to do with it what he liked. But I find it, frankly, unforgivable. It's failures of imagination like these that paved the road to the triumph of monotheism. The one, I guess, is always more graspable than the many; and after that gigantic Greek-and-homemade stew of gods and heroes, this sort of longing for something more graspable, more coherent, was practically inevitable. In other words, for all his expansive gestures, your friend, my dear Flaccus, was just craving metaphysical security. And that, I am afraid, is a contradiction in terms; perhaps the chief attraction of polytheism is that it would have none of that. But I suppose the place was getting too populous to indulge in insecurity of any kind. That's why your friend pins this whole thing, metaphysics and all, on his beloved Caesar in the first place. Civil wars, I should say, do wonders for one's spiritual orientation.
But it's no use talking to you like that. You all loved Augustus, didn't you? Even Naso, although he apparently was more curious about Caesar's sentimental property, beyond suspicion as it habitually was, than about his territorial conquests. But then, unlike your friend, Naso was a womanizer. Among other things, that's what makes it so difficult to picture his appearance, that's why I oscillate between Paul Newman and James Mason. A womanizer is an everyman: not that it means he should be trusted any more than a pedophile. And yet his account of what transpired between Dido and Aeneas sounds a bit more convincing than that of your friend. Naso's Dido claims that Aeneas is abandoning her and Carthage in such a hurry—remember, there was a storm looming and 'Aeneas must have had it with storms by then, what with being tossed on the high seas for seven years— not because he heeded the call of his divine mother but because Dido was pregnant with his child. And that's why she commits suicide: because her reputation is ruined. She is a queen, after all. Naso makes his Dido even question whether Venus was indeed the mother of Aeneas, for she was the goddess of love, and departure is an odd (though not unprecedented) way to manifest this sentiment. No doubt Naso spoofs your friend here. No doubt this depiction of Aeneas is unflattering and, given the fact that the legend of Rome's Trojan origins was the official historical orthodoxy from the third century B.C. onward, downright unpatriotic. Equally doubtless is that Virgil never read Naso's Heroides; otherwise, the former's treatment of Dido in the netherworld would be less reprehensible. For he simply stashes her away, together with Sychaeus, her former husband, in some remote nook of Elysium, where the two forgive and console each other. A retired couple in an old people's home. Out of our hero's way. To spare him agony, to provide him with a prophecy. Because the latter makes better copy. Anyhow, no second corporeality for Dido's soul.
You will argue that I am applying to him the standards that took two millennia to emerge. You are a good friend, Flaccus, but it's nonsense. I am judging him by his own standards, more evident actually in the Bucolics and the Georgics than in his epic. Don't play the innocent: you all had a minimum of seven centuries of poetry behind you. Five in Greek and two in your own Latin. Remember Euripides, remember his Alcestis: the wedding scene's scandal of King Admetus with his parents beats anything in Dostoevsky hands down —though you may not catch the reference. Which means it beats any psychological novel. Which is something we excelled at in Hyperborea a hundred years ago. Out there, you see, we are big on agony. Prophecy is a different matter. Which is to say, two thousand years were not in vain.
No, the standards are his, by way ofthe Georgics. Based on Lucretius and on Hesiod. In this line of work, Flaccus, there are no big secrets. Only small and guilty ones. Herein, I must add, lies their beauty. And the small and guilty secret of the Georgics is that their author, unlike Lucretius—and, for that matter, Hesiod—had no overriding philosophy. To say the least, he was no atomist, no epicurean. At best, I imagine, he hoped that the sum total of his lines would add up to a worldview, if he cared about such a thing in the first place. For he was a sponge, and a melancholic one at that. For him, the best—if not the only—way to understand the world was to list its contents, and if he missed anything in his Bucolics or in the Georgics, he caught up with that in his epic. He was an epic poet, indeed; an epic realist, if you will, since, speaking numerically, reality itself is quite epic. The cumulative effect ofhis output upon my reflective faculty has always been the sensation that this man has itemized the world, and in a rather meticulous fashion. Whether he talks of plants or planets, soils or souls, the deeds and/or destinies of the men of Rome, his close-ups are both blinding and binding; but so are things themselves, dear Flaccus, aren't they? No, your friend was no atomist, no epicurean; nor was he a stoic. If he believed in any principle, it was life's regeneration, and his Georgics' bees are no better than those souls chalked up for second corporeality in the Aeneid.