Aeneas is drawn, or driven, by a sense of duty—not by love or desire or ambition or pride or even plain curiosity, as was Odysseus. Duty, though indispensable to the success of large enterprises, is no longer a lovable virtue; it seems to be a cold, sad obligation. This is a defect that Virgil never overcomes.
All the antagonists of Aeneas in the poem—Dido; Turnus, who fights for his homeland and his bride against the invading Trojans; Camilla, the lovely leader of the Volscians (allies of Turnus) whom Aeneas slays in battle—all of these share a humanity Aeneas himself lacks. He is a gigantic marble figure, glimpsed through the smoke of a burning city or in the murk of battle, a symbol, representative of Rome in all her greatness but not really recognizable as a man. This central fact makes The Aeneid essentially inaccessible to many modern readers. We want our heroes to be made of flesh and blood, with their vices as well as their virtues as large as life, so we can see them clearly.
Virgil’s Aeneid hangs in the balance when we say these things. On the one hand, there are grand, unforgettable images; on the other hand, the cold inhumanity of its central figure. Virgil’s magnificent verse finally tips the scales. Tennyson, in a famous tribute, proclaimed:
I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began, Wielder of the stateliest measure ever molded by the lips of man.
The stately measure of the verse of Virgil moves inexorably, like an enormous, benevolent giant, marching one large, solemn step at a time, over mountains, plains, and seas. The Latin hexameter line is, in Virgil’s hands, wonderfully flexible; he can say anything serious in it (comedy is not much heard in The Aeneid). The verse is so fraught and burdened with symbolism that hundreds of lines can be detached from the poem and applied to other contexts. Thus when people still knew Latin as a matter of course, books of quotations were full of tags of Virgil. This Virgilian verse, however, is not easy to translate. Try to get hold of a good modern translation; for example, Robert Fitzgerald’s or Robert Fagles’s. Then, to obtain a sense of what Virgil sounds like in Latin, read a few pages of an older translation—for example, that of John Dryden, published in the 1690s. Dryden wrote in sonorous heroic couplets that are said to be the closest to Latin hexameters that English verse permits.
Do not expect to be exalted by Virgil, especially at first. The verse is an acquired taste. But give it a try. In the end, remember the image of Aeneas fleeing Troy, leaving it burning behind him, carrying his father on his shoulders, leading his little boy by the hand. Bernini sculpted it in marble, and a dozen painters have depicted it. It’s not easy to forget.
Why? Perhaps because every father would like to have a son like Aeneas and every son a father like Aeneas. As long as there is war and the desolation war brings, so long will that young man stand as a symbol of hope for those who are too old or too young to escape war’s destruction. Would that all such people on Earth had a young Aeneas to lead them to a new home.
OVID
43 BCE–17 CE
Metamorphoses
Publius Ovidius Naso was born in a small town east of Rome in 43 BCE. “Naso” in Latin means nose—why he acquired this nickname, as it were, is not known. He came of a comfortable family and received a good education at home, then moved to Rome for the training in rhetoric and other arts required for a professional life. But from an early age he knew that what he most wanted was to be a poet and, despite many troubles, he was, for the rest of his relatively long life.
He was a brilliant, witty man, and his poetry reveals those qualities. In his youth he wrote love poems and a mock didactic “treatise” on love and sex called Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). This and other poems like it won him friends as well as readers, which both amused and pleased him, although he knew he needed a greater challenge. He found this, in his middle age, in the large body of Greek mythical tales that Romans liked to read although they generally disapproved of the lack of Roman moral values in the stories. (Or maybe they disapproved of them because they knew the emperor did.)
Ovid began to compose the Metamorphoses when he was nearly forty and completed it in the year 1 BCE. The poem consists of a collection of stories, more or less based on familiar Greek myths, but really just stories about people—men and women, brothers and sisters, fathers and children, every kind of relationship both within families and without. The stories are strange, brutal, sad, funny, mocking, surprising, and wonderful. Metamorphoses is certainly a great book. And when it was finally published it established Ovid as the preeminent poet of Rome, since both Horace and Virgil now were dead.
Almost everyone loved the book. One man did not, and his opinion was the only one that counted. Ovid was vacationing on the famous Isle of Capri, in the Bay of Naples, when word came that Caesar Augustus wished to see him. It was an unavoidable journey, not pleasant. When Ovid arrived at Rome he was invited into the Emperor’s presence, where the two men met privately. No one knows exactly what was said except that Augustus was apparently not pleased by something Ovid had done, by an ”error” of some sort that the poet had committed. After the private audience, Ovid was tried by a private imperial court, convicted, and sentenced to banishment. He was not harmed; nor was he fined or deprived of his possessions; nor were his writings officially proscribed, except that they mysteriously disappeared from all the libraries and bookshops.
His banishment was terrible indeed. He was carried in an imperial ship through the Dardanelles and across the Black Sea to Tomi, a small city in the northeastern corner of Pontus, as the Romans called it. Tomi was totally bereft of everything Ovid held dear: there was no culture, no books or plays or any kind of public entertainment, and the people did not even speak Latin. (Their language was called Getic and I think no one speaks it now.) For years he remained an outcast in the town but was finally accepted as some kind of strange anomaly, and in a way he came to accept his fate. His wife, whom he loved, remained behind in Rome and never ceased to try to soften the Emperor’s mind, but to no effect. When Augustus died in CE 14, she petitioned his successor for mercy, but again failed, partly because everyone else—even her closest friends—were afraid to join her pleas lest they be tarred with the same brush. They never saw one another again, although Ovid never ceased to write letters to her. He lived for three more years and died at Tomi in CE 17 in the middle of one of its dreadfully dark, cold winters.