You can scarcely be expected to tolerate this, but more from my holiday reading. Washington National Airport bookshop was selling Antony Everitt's Cicero: this made me think about the Cicero/V/Augustus relationship. 'Hic vir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis Augustus Caesar, divi genus' (Aen.VI, 791-2). 'This is the man. So often do you hear him promised to you! Here he is, here is the holy seed.' There is a fracture in the narrative here, since this is the first time that Augustus has been promised to Aeneas: certainly there has been no oft-made promise in the earlier Aeneid. But Augustus had been 'the promised man' once before in Latin literature, indeed been the subject of promises in repeated form. This was in the concluding words of section 18 of Cicero's Fifth Philippic. Cicero offers personal sureties for young Caesar. The crucial sentence begins 'promitto'. Both the sentence and its context emphasise rather often (?saepius) the promise made, that the young great man would sustain the faltering Republic. This speech marked a crucial gain of legitimacy for young Caesar/future Augustus. Rather ungratefully, he subverted the Republic and the rule of law and allowed Cicero himself, whom he had called 'father', to be murdered. Of course, his side of the story (not entirely implausible) would have been that Cicero was his Laius, who would one day have destroyed him or abandoned him to hostile forces. Even if we keep this side of the story in mind, V's allusion to the Fifth Philippic adds sarcastic and horrifying colour to the picture of the Promised Man. But again, the picture may not be wholly despairing. One of V's themes is that where the gods are determined that something must happen, they can and will renew a promise that human beings have broken: this is what happens in Aen.XII. The story of Aen.XII features a father figure, Latinus, who is committed to the traditions of his country but cannot control events or prevent treachery. (The words following 'divi genus', 'aurea condet saecula', form the starting point for R.F.Thomas' 'V and the Augustan Reception' (2001)) - Martin Hughes
----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
