In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes >After reading all of the replies, I find that one name is conspicuously absent >from the list--Dr. Holford Strevens, a man whose commentary is often >delightfully instructive and insightful. I for one would like to read what he >might have to say about IV. > The reason for my silence is that I have been away. But a few observations occur:
The discussion seems to me to be skewed by certain perhaps questionable but at any rate anachronistic assumptions, as that imperialism is a bad thing and that poets' duty is to blame rulers not to praise them. It seems to me that if we have a problem with Vergil in the light of our own values, instead of judging him by them we ought to put them under interrogation; I mean the values themselves, not merely whether we live up to them. To take them in reverse order: the poet as rebel by duty (as opposed to dandy nonconformist, or adherent of a patron who was out not in) is an invention of the age when kings and nobles who patronized the arts were displaced in power by businessmen who didn't: it is more acceptable, in artists' eyes, to kill on the battlefield than to make a killing on the Stock Exchange because there is more chance of being rewarded for one's praises. That is all the moral merit I see in the change. In some countries, particularly those formerly under imperial rule, anti-imperialism is part of the national ethos; the USA briefly escaped from such pieties in the days of TDR, but thereafter slipped back even when practising imperialism itself, or at least being accused of doing so. In Britain, this is a newer fashion: we might side with Athens against Macedon (identified since the 179os with Revolutionary or Napoleonic France, and more recently with the Kaiser's or Hitler's Germany), but there was nothing wrong with imperialism so long as it was ours; anti-imperialism was a minority view until it became useful for palliating the retreat from empire: we didn't like to admit we were scuttling because we couldn't or wouldn't pay the bills, but patched it up, according to taste, with the right-wing lie that we had successively educated our colonies for self-government, and the left-wing lie that we had recognized the immorality of ruling others. On the other hand, we liked to think we were better than the Romans, which is why we were often ready to say nasty things about their cruelty and why it was your character-building philistinical public schoolmaster who backed Dido against Aeneas, the lady against the cad. By contrast, for some Cinquecento critics Dido was a most immoral lady who got what she deserved: Vergil too tells us that marriage was the fair name in which she cloaked her wrong, but with Medea and Ariadne before him makes her an overpowering figure who moved Augustine (her fellow African) to tears and was always likely to win the sympathies of readers whose ancestors had not been threatened by Carthage and whose own generation had not been threatened by Cleopatra. If we must speculate on why Vergil wanted the poem burnt, was it because he feared he had given Dido all the best lines? (No, I don't think so, but it's no worse a guess than most of the others.) Perhaps we ask the wrong question: not what Aeneas should have done, ourselves being on the outside like a rhetorician in a suasoria, but, each one of us, what oneself would have done. Even so Sophocles' _Electra_ is almost dehumanized in her longing for revenge; but how would any of us have behaved in her circumstance? At any rate the tragic understanding, that the world is not ruled for the sake of human happiness, lies at the heart of the book. I agree with Helen that Vergil deems himself to be as good a Roman as any other, but with two qualifications: that since he is not politically competing with either the _nobiles_ or the _plebs urbana_, he is the less likely to be challenged in it; and that he is aware of himself as part of that _tota Italia_ that rallied to Imp. Caesar against the alien queen, and in which Rome herself was subsumed. See _Aen._ 8. 678-9 Hinc Augustus agens Italos in proelia Caesar cum patribus populoque, penatibus et magnis dis. Augustus, with the Senate and People of - not Rome but Italy! Think of the history of the previous century, the struggle of the Italian upper classes to be accepted as equals by their counterparts at Rome, and the tendency of the Roman plebs to back the optimates against them; think of the invention of Italy as a political entity, not by Rome, but by her exasperated former allies at Corfinium, who set up their confederacy of *Vitelliu'* and adopted the emblem of a bull trampling a wolf; think of Ovid on his Paelignan forefathers, _quos sua libertas ad honesta coegerat arma_. Rome prevailed in the field, but it was the allies who won their equality; *that* was the anti-imperialism of the age, brought to triumphant culmination by Augustus and celebrated by Vergil; typologically in the subsumption of Trojan into Italian, expressly in the verses just quoted. _And he was right_: in order that Italy and the whole empire might be held together, power had to be drained from Roman aristocrats and Roman _plebs_ alike; in the future indeed it would be drained away even from Italians, but that it was not given him to see. The question why the empire should be held together might occur to persons outside the Peninsula, but there was no reason for it to trouble either the Romans whose pride and glory was the empire or the Marsa manus, Paeligna cohors, Vestina virum vis whose vigour and valour had won it, provided their services were properly rewarded. (Nor were Gauls, Greeks, Etruscans, Phoenicians, and the rest, throughout the entire period of Roman history, in the slightest bit opposed to imperialism either, so long as they were the imperialists.) Vergil, then, had every personal and national reason to praise Augustus, and none to blame him; but to say that praise of Augustus was his only purpose, as if he were Claudian puffing Stilicho, is a schoomaster's simplicity. Leofranc Holford-Strevens *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*- Leofranc Holford-Strevens 67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone Oxford scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter? OX2 6EJ tel. +44 (0)1865 552808(home)/267865(work) fax +44 (0)1865 512237 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. 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