Voices of Love and Theft
...nec soli poenas dant sanguine Teucri
quondam etiam victis redit in praecordia virtus
victoresque cadunt Danai. crudelis ubique
luctus, ubique pavor et plurima mortis imago.
…And it was not only the Trojans
Who paid in blood. At times the vanquished
Felt their valour pulse through their hearts,
And the conquering Greeks fell. Raw fear
Was everywhere, grief was everywhere,
Everywhere the many masks of death. (Aeneid, Book II lines 366-369, trans. S Lombardo)
I’m teaching Virgil again. It‘s hard to believe that it’s been ten years since I last taught this greatest of poets. Although the school room has turned into a kitchen table and the student is my fifteen year old son rather than a group of girls from London, it’s reassuring to see that while some things have changed, many remain the same. There is still the sense of wonder I’ve felt around Virgil’s work ever since first encountering it at fifteen myself. The familiar joys and tensions of teaching advanced Latin literature to a GCSE student are alive and well. Most importantly the awareness that in passing on what one has been taught to the next generation one is intimately involved in preserving things of value burns brighter than ever. We learn after all so that we might pass on; knowledge acquired and then hoarded for one’s own satisfaction is, in the final analysis, knowledge lost.
During my meeting with Virgil this time around, his poetry has aligned fortuitously with other matters occupying my thoughts. With the current situation which we’re all sharing in some way, I’ve been thinking about experience in this world of ours. More specifically I’ve been contemplating our interconnection. The wonderful piece, Lineage and the Art of Being Narcissus, has deepened my thinking in this area. On a more intimate level, as our home life has become more vibrant, more full of activity and richer due to the homeschooling we have embarked upon, I’ve been thinking about family and the role of both parents and children in this time of modernity and fragmentation. And so we come to Virgil. The selections my son is studying are drawn from the Aeneid and one really couldn’t pick a better epic to expand upon these themes. Virgil is concerned with many areas of human existence and is expert at conjuring them with all their textures and multi faceted reflections. His understanding of our mutual dependence, of the joy, grief and horror we can visit upon one other is displayed with a sensitivity I have yet to read elsewhere.
Now Book 2, from whence the extracts come, is its own galaxy within the universe that is the Aeneid in toto. I have come to a fuller appreciation of its power later in life. In describing the sack of Troy through the eyes of his temporary narrator Aeneas, Virgil focuses with a sharpness, at times unbearable, on the beauty, power and sanctity of what was and the unnatural horror of the manner in which what is to be is brought about. One only has to spend moments sheltering under the laurel tree with Queen Hecuba and her daughters at the altar and then watch as her son Polites is cut down before his father’s eyes to bear witness to this. Moreover one sees the death of King Priam, now aged and bereft of the protection of his son Hector with agonising clarity. It is a clarity shot through with horror as his death is visited upon him by Pyrrhus the son of Achilles. Now in the Underworld, this Homeric hero had showed Priam clemency in Book 24 of Homer’s Iliad. As Pyrrhus reminds the reader in his final taunt to the once mighty ruler before he slaughters him mercilessly; the qualities of the father are not necessarily displayed by the child,
‘cui Pyrrhus: ‘referes ergo haec et nuntius ibis
Pelidae genitori. illi mea tristia facta
degeneremque Neoptolemum narrare memento.
nunc morere.’
‘…….And Pyrrhus
‘Then you can take this news to my father
The son of Peleus. Be sure to tell him
About my sad behaviour and how degenerate
His son has become. Now die.’ (op. cit. lines 547-550)
At its core, Book 2 shows the reader that in the final end, families have to save each other and that which they hold most dear when their world is destroyed and all solidity and security blown to pieces. There is another episode in the book which details the fate of a family; the family of Aeneas himself. Aeneas is not shown in the most favourable light in many of the episodes which make up this part of the story. He is an honest and unflinching narrator and spares Dido none of the details of his own ‘furor ‘ ‘rage’. He freely admits that it is his divine mother Venus who reminds him of his own family, alone and unprotected whilst he rages through the city intent on slaughter or death. Subsequently however, at the point at which his father Anchises agrees to flee the city, convinced by the divine portents surrounding his grandson Iulus, Aeneas steps firmly into the role of ‘Pius Aeneas’. Thus he takes up the mantle of pietas (duty), one of the key themes of Virgil’s epic and one of the reasons I return to consideration of Aeneas’ character time and again. In fact, in the scene immortalised both by Virgil here and also by various visual artists, Aeneas becomes a living manifestation of pietas. The scene is worth quoting extensively:
‘Ergo age care pater, cervici imponere nostrae;
Ipse subibo umeris, nec me labor iste gravabit;
Quo res cumque cadet, unum et commune periclum,
una salus ambobus erit. mihi parvus Iulus
Sit comes, et longe serves vestigia coniunx
……
tu, genitor, cape sacra manu patriosque penates
me bello e tanto digressum et caede recenti
attrectare nefas, donec me flume vivo
abluero’
‘Come dear father, onto my shoulders now.
You will not weigh me down and come what may
We will face it together, peril or salvation.
Little Iulus will walk beside me, and my wife
Will walk in my footsteps some distance behind.
…..
Take into your hands, Father, the sacred gods
Of our country. It would be a sacrilege
If I touched them before I washed away
The bloody filth of battle in a living river’ (op.cit. lines 707-721)
The sheer physicality of the scene amplifies its central point; Aeneas will carry his father, yet he will not be weighed down by his load; he will use his body in service to another and whatever fate befalls them it will befall them as one. As Peter Jones says in Reading Virgil, ‘Here is true pietas in perfect action- the duty one owes to the family and to the gods.’
Perhaps it is because the foils to this scene are Aeneas’ prior individualistic rage and the horror of Priam and Hecuba’s fate. Perhaps because the scene itself has been captured in visual form but whenever I read these lines I am reminded that we are all links in a chain. Each generation leans on the one which came before and then provides support to the next. As Aeneas shows here, our own safety and security are meaningless if we do not also care for those around us. Which of course from the Buddhist perspective is the exact source from which we begin to generate the forces of limitless loving kindness and compassion. We start from the genuine intimacy and eventually radiate it outwards to all. So this beautiful depiction of interdependence stands as a beacon of light shining brightly amidst the horrors, the death and the tragedy of Book 2.
After my thinking on the specifics of Book 2, I begin to daydream about one of my favourite landscapes, the dream castles of dependence and interconnection within the field of literature itself. When I read extracts such as the one which opens this piece, I am silenced by the phrase, ‘plurima mortis imago’ ‘the many masks of death’ One could think about these words for hours and still not fathom the depths of what Virgil is describing. I stop short when I read the words ‘nec soli poenas dant sanguine Teucri ‘ ‘And it was not only the Trojans who paid in blood’. One of the best songs on Bob Dylan’s album Tempest is titled Pay in Blood. Now that song is talking far more about Odysseus than Aeneas. Odysseus who does indeed pay in blood, not his own but that of the suitors who ravaged his home and terrorised his wife and son for twenty years. Nonetheless, one still gets the thrill of the intertextuality. We can also remember the direct quote from Book 6 (lines 851-853) of the Aeneid in Dylan’s song Lonesome Day Blues;
‘I’m going to spare the defeated, ‘cause I’m going to speak to the crowd
I’m going to teach peace to the conquered, I’m going to tame the proud’ (Dylan, Lonesome Day Blues)
And why stop there? As Book 2 is after all, the story of the fall of Troy how can we ignore the Trojan women standing by the cypress tree, who figure so vividly in My Own Version of You
‘Stand over there by the cypress tree
Where the Trojan women and children were sold into slavery
Long before the first Crusade
Way back before England or America were made.’ (Dylan, My Own Version of You)
Of course here we are wandering into territory which Euripides might legitimately claim for himself!
One can, in fact, see love and theft as a metaphors for all true literature. The thief always loves that from which he steals and, if he is a master thief, he will always enrich and add meaning to the original. Maybe you choose to view Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower amidst the calypso singers and mermaids of Dylan’s universe. Perhaps you’re a French girl spending time with Shakespeare as he reads Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the 16 century; you smile as he reworks the tragic story of Pyramus and Thisbe into the humorous play within the play for Midsummer Night’s Dream’s rude mechanicals with his brilliant genius. Maybe you’re haunted by the visible darkness of Virgil’s vision and you reflect that he could not have crafted his exquisite epic without the bright realism of the Homeric warriors’ universe. Maybe it’s noon and you’re on the darkest part of a narrow road; Dante appears and you travel with him to depths of the Inferno with Virgil as mentor and guide. Wherever one looks, one sees interconnection and dependence. As in literature so in life, the walls we erect, the boundaries we create are illusory. The water does not freeze, the water flows.
