It is indeed true that the story follows from the view of V's personality
that both we and the ancient biographers attribute to V: if he was that kind
of person and if the poem was not 'essentially complete' (Mackail's phrase,
I think) he would have wanted it destroyed. My doubts arise from the fact,
as I would see it, that the poem does seem to me to be 'essentially
complete' and I wonder if V would really have wanted so much careful work to
vanish. Scholars have noticed the cross reference between beginning and
end, with 'condit', where the plunging sword seems to 'lay a foundation',
recalling 'condere', where the immense labour of founding the Roman people
is noted as the theme of the poem. - Martin Hughes
- Original Message -
From: Leofranc Holford-Strevens [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 11:06 PM
Subject: Re: VIRGIL: why Virgil wanted to burn his poem
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], David
Wilson-Okamura [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
At 11:03 AM 10/18/01 +0100, Patrick Roper wrote:
I thought that that might be the case, after all most creative people
feel they could have done better - the stuff on the page, isn't quite
what seemed to be in the mind. But do we know this is what Virgil
thought? Did he say so somewhere? Or did one of his contemporaries
say that of him?
As Patrick Roper and Jim O'Hara point out, we need to be skeptical. In
addition to Thomas, see, for instance, Nicholas Horsfall, Virgil: His
Life
and Times, in _A Companion to the Study of Virgil_, ed. Nicholas
Horsfall,
Mnemosyne Supplement 151 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 1-25.
Exactly. The all but explicit conclusion of Horsfall's analysis is that
we do not even know *whether* Vergil wanted the _Aeneid_ burnt, never
mind why. But the story is attractive on so many grounds: perfectionist
poet, enlightened monarch, the rights of posterity against an author's
wishes; after all, even those of us who are neither poets nor princes
will be posterity to more and more authors as we grow older. (And if you
rebel against the enlightened Augustus, then you can apply a different
_color_, or in modern parlance spin, as Broch did.) It has also, from
Hyginus onwards, licensed adverse criticism of particular passages
within the supreme masterpiece: since Vergil recognized that his poem
had faults, he must have agreed with the critic that this or that
expression or assertion was one of them, and would have corrected it had
he lived. The psychological utility of this safety-valve is rather more
evident than its scientific value, since there is always someone else to
say it isn't a fault at all (even in the case of the half-lines);
readers just need the story to be true.
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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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)
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