Excuse reference to holiday reading, found on my first visit to Washington DC - but this is a thought suggested by David Ovason's 'Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital'. Ovason believes that the city was founded partly with an eye to achieving, at last, the beginning of the fulfilment of the 'Ultima Cumaei/iam redit et Virgo' prophecy. The city is particularly associated, he says, with the constellation of Virgo, so offers, I suppose, a new locus, less corrupted than any in the Old World, for the final return of Astraea. This would link American independence with the anti-Augustan and indeed Republican readings of V that Gibbon and others were developing in the later eighteenth century. 1. I don't comment on Ovason's main claims, which may be fanciful. Ovason got me thinking again about the inner logic of anti-Augustan readings of V. Perhaps I too am being fanciful, but it strikes me that if one thinks that the Prophecy is so impressive that it must somehow be true and also attributes an anti-Augustan spirit to V then one must be drawn to some sort of belief in a New (latterly 'Third') Rome, a belief that might develop strong religious overtones. 2. The term 'anti-Augustan' is not quite fitting for the Eclogues/Bucolics, since when they were written the future Augustus was no more than the younger Caesar, one dynast among others. But if V was consistent, and if he was anti-Augustan later, then the poem and prophecy must be Republican, indeed a continuation by V and Pollio of Cicero's doomed quest to lock this dangerous young genius into the Republican cause, though without Cicero's efforts to dump Antony. But V would have been all too well aware of what had happened to Cicero and would have given scope for his poem to be understood and his prophecy validated, in somewhat occult terms, even if its short-term promises came to seem vain. 3. The next implication would be the Child of the Prophecy must be an allegorical figure, representing the Republic resurgent after war and tyranny, rather than, as so many have supposed, a real indvidual about to take the role of Messiah. At that rate the poem implicitly calls on the dynasts not to do what between them they were about to do, ie stop the resurgence of the Republic in its tracks. Augustus' actual behaviour, on this showing sending Astraea back into occlusion and exile, would amount to sacrilege. 4. Rome would then be desecrated in the same manner as Troy had been desecrated by Laomedon's treachery. Rome could be no more than one of the peritura regna. 5. So the Prophecy instructs those who are moved by it, and understand its occult meaning, that there is to be a New Rome founded, at a distance of space and time, as a new Republic, destined for heroic deeds and marking a benign evolution in the whole natural order. 6. Correspondingly, the message to the real Rome of V's own time is not one of complete historical uselessness, but certainly of eventual failure, even doom. 7. In sum, what I'm suggesting is that if we say that V always held to the religious views of the Fourth Eclogue and was always a Republican opposed to Caesarian/Augustan monarchy, we must see him as rejecting, on quite deep religious grounds, not just the Roman regime but Rome itself. His only hope would indeed have lain in some sort of refoundation, providing a new locus for Astraea's return. Is this a reductio ad absurdum of anti-Augustan readings of V? I certainly found the un-British heat and sun of Washington, secret architecture or no secret architecture, impressive. Perhaps they got to my brain. - Martin Hughes
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