All posts tagged W.F. Jackson Knight

Virgil and the Christian World by T.S. Eliot (1951)

T.S. Eliot: a potted biography

The great Anglo-American poet, playwright and critic T.S. Eliot (1888 to 1965) came from America to England just before the First World War, published a small number of sensuous, ‘modernist’ poems displaying a sensibility in debt to French Symbolism. Soon after the Great War ended he published the seminal modernist poem, The Waste Land (1922), but also established a reputation as a deeply insightful and intelligent critic of much earlier English literature, particularly the Jacobean playwrights and metaphysical poets of the early 1600s.

His reputation was enhanced and his influence steadily spread, especially among the younger generation of writers and critics, due to his editorship of a literary and philosophical magazine, The Criterion, which he edited from 1922 to 1939. Readers of The Criterion came to realise that, far from being a youthful revolutionary who was set on overturning literary values, and despite the radical format of The Waste Land (collage, fragments, quotes from multiple foreign languages), Eliot was, in fact, a profoundly conservative thinker.

This was made explicit when in 1928, in the foreword to a book of essays titled ‘For Lancelot Andrewes’ (the Jacobean bishop and writer) Eliot ‘came out’, declaring himself ‘a classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion,’ committing himself to hierarchy and order in all three fields.

He had already taken British citizenship. In the later 1930s he attempted to revive the verse drama of the Elizabethans which he had spent so much time analysing, on the modern stage, writing a series of plays in verse, starting with Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

During the Second World War Eliot worked as a reader for the publishers Faber & Faber during the day and a fire warden at night. The masterpiece of his maturity was the set of four longer poems collectively titled the Four Quartets (Burnt Norton, 1936, then East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, published in 1940, 1941 and 1942, respectively).

After the war, Eliot settled into the position of Grand Old Man of Poetry, with a leading role at the leading publisher of poetry, Faber. He continued to write essays and make broadcasts on the radio. With his public conversion to Anglicanism he had achieved an ideological and psychological stability.

Having lived through two ruinous world wars, a lot of Eliot’s effort was now devoted towards helping to define and preserve the best of European civilisation. His early essays had been offshoots of a poet working through his own problems and interests; the later essays are a conscious effort to establish a canon of classic literature, trying to formulate universal categories to define and preserve it.

It is in this spirit that in 1951 he delivered a lecture on BBC radio titled ‘Virgil and the Christian World’, which was then printed in The Listener magazine and collected in the volume On Poetry and Poets.

Virgil and the Christian World

As befits radio this is not an address to a specialist audience of literary scholars but a more broad brush approach for a general audience. Eliot explains that he is not setting out to assert Virgil’s special value as a poet or moralist, but to pay attention to ‘those characteristics of Virgil which render him peculiarly sympathetic to the Christian mind’.

Straight away he addresses the notorious issue of the Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. This, the fourth and final of Virgil’s set of lengthy poems about the countryside or ‘eclogues’, contains extravagant praise of the forthcoming birth of a special child, who, the poet claims, will bring a new golden age, the return of Saturn and the Virgin, the gift of divine life etc.

As early Christianity established itself, early Christian apologists ransacked all available texts, from old Jewish scriptures to the entire literature of the ancient world, looking for proofs and prophecies, any text anywhere which could be made to prefigure and predict the arrival of their messiah.

Thus the Fourth Eclogue was quickly adopted by these apologists and Virgil was made an honorary Christian before the fact because Christians claimed he had been gifted with spiritual prophecy to foresee the coming of the Christ. Throughout the entire Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance scholars and theologians genuinely believed that Virgil had predicted the coming of the Christ child.

Eliot makes clear right at the start that he in now way thinks that Virgil foresaw the birth of Christ (some 19 years after he himself died). Rather, Eliot thinks the Fourth Eclogue was written to a friend of his, Pollio, whose wife was expecting a baby.

[In fact, the notes to the OUP edition of the Eclogues which I recently read, suggest that this passage of the Fourth Eclogue was describing the hoped-for son of the recent marriage of Antony and Octavius’s sister, Octavia (in 40 BC), because contemporaries devoutly hoped that their union would usher in a final end to Rome’s endless civil wars.]

Eliot then ponders the meaning of the words prophet, prophecy and predict. He himself has no doubt that Virgil had no inkling of the coming of Christ. On the other hand, he suggests that if the word ‘inspiration’ means writing something the poet himself does not completely understand, and which he or she may themselves misinterpret once the ‘inspiration’ has passed, the maybe Virgil was ‘inspired’.

This is by way of preparing the way for some autobiography, for Eliot then paints an obvious portrait of himself and how his most famous poem, The Waste Land, which arose out of his purely private concerns, amazed him by going on to become the rallying cry for an entire generation of writers.

A poet may believe that he is expressing only his private experience; his lines may be for him only a means of talking about himself without giving himself away; yet for his readers what he has written may come to be the expression both of their own secret feelings and of the exultation or despair of a generation.

A poet need not know what his poetry will come to mean for others just as a prophet need not understand the meaning of their prophetic utterance. Thus there may be any number of secular, historical explanations for the Fourth Eclogue; but he repeats his definition of ‘inspiration’ as tapping into a force which defies all historical research.

Anyway the point is that the existence of the Fourth Eclogue which so many Christians mistakenly thought was divinely inspired, gave Virgil and his writing a kind of free pass into the new Christian order, opening ‘the way for his influence in the Christian world’, something mostly denied to other explicitly ‘pagan’ authors. On the face of it this is a lucky accident but Eliot doesn’t believe it was an ‘accident’.

Eliot anticipates Jackson Knight’s view, expressed in his Penguin translation of the Aeneid from a few years later (1956), that Virgil was the poet of the gateway, looking both back to the pagan world and forwards to the Christian dispensation.

So after these preliminaries, Eliot gets to the meat of his essay: In what way did Virgil anticipate the Christian West? Eliot tells us that, to answer his question, he is going to rely on a book by a German scholar, Theodor Haecker, titled Virgil: The Father of the West.

Before he gets started though, Eliot rather surprisingly devotes a page to autobiography, telling us that as a boy learning the Classics he much preferred Greek to Latin (and still does). However he found himself immediately more drawn to Virgil than Homer. The main reason was that the gods in Homer are so capricious, selfish and immoral and all the so-called ‘heroes’ are in fact coarse ruffians. The only decent character in the entire book is Hector.

Nowadays, if forced to explain his preference, he’d say he prefers the world of Virgil to the world of Homer: it was ‘a more civilised world of dignity, reason and order’. Eliot goes on to compare the Greek and Roman worlds, saying the culture of Athens was much superior in the arts, philosophy and pure science. Virgil made of Roman culture something better than it was. Then he quietly makes a very big leap in the argument, claiming that Virgil’s ‘sensibility was more nearly Christian than any other Roman or Greek poet’. How so?

He says he is going to follow Haeckel’s procedure of examining key words in the poem and highlights labor, pietas and fatum. However, he immediately drops this plan and veers off into a consideration of the Georgics. What Virgil really intended the Georgics for remains a bit of a mystery: they’re not particularly useful as a handbook to farming, and they contain many digressions completely extraneous to their ostensible subject matter. After pondering Virgil’s motivation, Eliot concludes that Virgil intended to affirm the dignity of agricultural labour and the importance of the cultivation of the soil for the wellbeing of the state, both materially and spiritually.

The Greeks may have perfected the notion that the highest type of life is the contemplative life (Plato et al) but they tended to look down on manual labour. For Eliot the Georgics affirm the importance of manual labour on the land. Then he makes a leap to talk about the monastic movement which grew up within medieval Christendom and how the monastic orders combined both aspects, combining a life of contemplation with quite arduous labour, as both being essential for the life of the complete man.

It may be that the monks who read and copied Virgil’s manuscripts recognised their spirit in the Georgics.

Now onto the Aeneid. Eliot says this epic poem is:

concerned with the imperium romanum, with the extension and justification of imperial rule.

(quite unlike W.A. Camps with his silly claim that the Aeneid is not a work of propaganda.) But Eliot claims that Virgil’s ‘ideal of empire’ was founded on a devotion to the land, to the region, village, and family within the village. This brief explanation is his discussion of labor because Eliot now turns to the more important concept of pietas.

In English someone is called ‘pious’ if they make a great show of their religious faith. Eliot says that pietas for Virgil had much wider associations: it implies a respectful attitude to the individual, the family, the region, and towards ‘the imperial destiny of Rome’. Aeneas is also ‘pious’ in his respect towards the gods and punctilious observance of rites and offerings.

Eliot delves further into the meanings of the word. Piety to a father can, for example, mean not only affection for an individual but acceptance of a bond which one has not chosen. Piety towards the father is also an acceptance of the correct order of things, and so, obliquely, respect of the gods. After some shilly-shallying Eliot gets to the point he wants to make: all these forms of piety involve some form of humility and humility is a professedly Christian virtue. Aeneas is, in this respect, the polar opposite of Achilles or Odysseus, who have not a shred of humility about them.

[Interestingly, given the date of the essay, written soon after the end of the Second World War, Eliot describes Aeneas as the original Displaced Person, a fugitive from a ruined city and an obliterated society.]

Odysseus endures ten years of exile but eventually returns to his home hearth, to a loyal wife, a dutiful son, his slaves and faithful dog. Whereas Aeneas can’t go home: he is a man on a mission and accomplishing that mission, the poem makes repeatedly clear, is only the very beginning of the long history of Roman origins and rise. Odysseus’s story ends when he gets home (and kills the suitors); Aeneas’s entire journey is itself only an episode in the much larger history of Rome.

Therefore, Eliot asserts (with a bit of a stretch, in my view) Aeneas is ‘the prototype of a Chistian hero’. He accepts the duty laid on him by the gods regardless of the price to himself. He subjugates his own will and desires to his god-given task.

This brings Eliot to fatum (so, OK, we are proceeding via the key word process). There is an excess of words to cover this concept. Eliot says maybe the best translation is ‘destiny’ but then makes the polemical point that you cannot have ‘destiny’ in a purely mechanical universe.

Eliot then tries to give a Christian interpretation to Aeneas’s ‘destiny’. It is a burden and a responsibility rather than a reason for self glorification. It happens to some men and not others because some have the gifts and the responsibility but they did not make these; something external made these and the humble man accepts the gifts and the responsibility. Who made them? Not the anthropomorphised pagan gods who behave so selfishly and vulgarly in the poem. Some power much deeper.

He zeroes in on the entire Dido episode (book 4) in particular Aeneas’s shame at abandoning Dido, shame which is revived when he meets her shade in the underworld in book 6 and she refuses to look at him or speak. This, for Eliot, more than personal shame, symbolises how much Aeneas suffered to carry out his god-given destiny. Making his point completely explicit, he says: ‘it is a very heavy cross to bear.’

Eliot can think of no other pagan poet who could have created this situation with its emotional, psychological and philosophical subtlety.

What does this ‘destiny’ mean? For Virgil’s conscious mind, and his contemporary readers, not least the all-powerful Augustus, there’s no doubt it means the imperium romanum. But Eliot then makes some dubious and sweeping generalisations. He claims that Virgil proposed for his contemporaries a noble ideal of empire – personally, I don’t see that in the poem. There are Anchises’ lines reminding Romans they must rule well and there’s praise of Augustus for bringing peace and order, but that’s about it. Eliot stretches it by claiming that Virgil’s work proposed ‘the highest ideal’ for any secular empire. Personally, I just don’t see that. In my view what the Aeneid praises is military conquest, might and power. There might be a strong thread of regret and sadness running through it, but that is the poem’s overt message.

Eliot proceeds to claim that ‘we are all, so far as we inherit the civilisation of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire’. Is that true? I can see strong points on either side of the argument.

But he then goes on to claim that the Roman Empire Virgil imagined was ‘greater’ than the actual one of generals and proconsuls and businessmen. Eliot claims that Virgil invented this ideal and ‘passed [it] on to Christianity to develop and to cherish.’ I disagree on a number of levels.

First, I find the actual process of creating empire, as described in the Aeneid, to be hyper-violent and destructive, flagrantly contrary all Christian morality.

Second, part of the ideal which Eliot is describing must include the idealisation of the first Roman emperor Augustus. I can see why Virgil a) pinned his hopes for peace on b) sucked up to, the most powerful man in Rome, but in the end the entire poem amounts to the propagandistic adulation of a mass murderer, a man who achieved supreme power by liquidating all his enemies and then ensuring nobody could threaten his unique rule for the next 40 years. The Aeneid defends a military dictator.

So I just don’t agree when Eliot claims that it passed onto its Christian heirs any kind of noble model for how to run a spiritual empire. The exact opposite.

Eliot reiterates his claim that we are all still citizens the Roman Empire. Well, there are arguments both ways but ultimately I think he is incorrect. The state we inhabit in England in 2022 owes more to the non-Roman traditions of the pagan Danes and Anglo-Saxons and feudal Normans who each conquered this country, than to the Roman civilisation which they eclipsed. Our democracy owes nothing to Rome; it developed out of medieval feudalism, itself an import from Normandy, itself a colony of Vikings.

I think Eliot’s vision of a total European civilisation is erroneous and that his claim that this civilisation was in part inspired by Virgil is wrong.

Moreover, there is a blindingly obvious problem here, which is that Eliot is defending empire as an ideal form of government. Obviously this was considerably easier to do in 1951 than it would be nowadays. Millions of inhabitants of the former British Empire have immigrated to Britain and their children, in politics, in culture and in academia, have enthusiastically set about damning the British Empire, rubbishing any claim that it ever had anything positive about it. So just the sound of Eliot defending empire as a ‘noble ideal’ sounds badly in our time.

As to whether Virgil’s ideal of a suprahuman noble empire actually did inspire church authorities in the Middle Ages, I think you’d need a book examining the impact of the Virgilian ‘ideal’ on theologians, political thinkers, churchmen and statesmen throughout the Middle Ages and that would be a vast undertaking. I bet one exists, though. I’d love to read it.

This was, after all, only a half-hour radio lecture. Eliot’s sensitivity and insight and intellect bring out all kinds of aspects of Virgil’s achievement. And his thesis – that Virgil’s achievement of creating the notion of an ideal empire was to haunt the European imagination – is one of those ideas which is itself so big and vague that you can’t really prove or disprove it. But it’s an interesting perspective to add to the hundreds of other perspectives with which we can view Virgil’s epic poem.

Eliot concludes his essay with a page about a word which is missing from Virgil which is ‘love’. Amor does crop up, especially in the story of Dido and Aeneas. But it has nowhere near the force and central importance that it has for a Christian poet like Dante. It never has:

the same significance as a principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe that pietas is given.

Thus Eliot agrees (no surprise) with Dante’s positioning of Virgil in the Divine Comedy as an inspired teacher and guide right up to the barrier of belief, which he is not allowed to cross. In Eliot’s view Virgil mapped out a universe which in many ways anticipated the Christian universe, and handed many of its values onto later generations of Christian thinkers (and poets). But there is a line and Virgil doesn’t cross over into being a Christian. He can’t.

Instead, Virgil was limited by his position in history: the highest value he can conceive of, the value which underpins so much of the character and action of the Aeneid, was pietas, respect for father, family and fatherland.

But the highest value for the Christian poet Dante was love, the love which has created the entire universe and moves the sun and the stars and which we can all aspire to. Next to the gorgeous rose of Dante’s universe of love, Virgil’s pietas is a hard, iron sword, the colour of Roman imperialism.

Other Eliot reviews

A Choice of Kipling’s Verse by T.S. Eliot (1941)

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Introductions to the Aeneid – 3. David West

I own three English translations of the Aeneid:

the 1956 Penguin classics prose translation by W.F. Jackson Knight
the 1970 verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum
the 1991 Penguin classics prose translation by David West

This is the last of three blog posts giving detailed analyses of the introductions to each of these translations. This one looks at David West’s introduction to his 1991 translation. It also gives examples of each of the translators’ work, first their renderings of the Aeneid’s opening 12 lines, then of the final few lines.

1991 Penguin classics prose translation by David West

Unlike the vapouring spiritualist Jackson Knight, and the namedropping Vietnam War protestor Mandelbaum, West is wonderfully unpretentious and to the point. In his introduction’s brisk 6 pages he bluntly says the Aeneid is about a man who lived 3,000 years ago in Asia Minor so – why should we care?

1. The origins of Rome

He gives a fantastically compressed précis of the plot before going on to say that, 300 years after Aeneas’ legendary death, the city of Rome was founded by his descendants. So that’s one reason to read the Aeneid: because it is the foundation story of the most important city in European history, the state that underpins modern Europe.

2. Aeneas an emblem of the refugee from war

Another reason is because it is a great poem. Part of this is down to it being about a very human figure, Prince Aeneas, a man who knew defeat and exile, love and the loss of love, who maintained his sense of duty to family and country through thick and thin, who knew war and hated it but was capable of fighting with hatred.

At the end of the twentieth century the world is full of such people.

If West was writing in 1990, then he was about to witness the First Gulf War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the prolonged civil wars in Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide and the Great War of Africa, followed by 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. Yes. War and the bitterness of war, and exile and grief and lost love, these are eternal fixtures of the human condition. I am writing this on day 201 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The gods have changed but for the men there is not much difference.

3. Virgil’s humanity

But the Aeneid is not only about The Human Condition but is full of individual human touches, insights and moments which make the poem a deeply rewarding read:

Dido putting the Trojans at their easy 1.567-578
the grief of Andromache meeting a Trojan youth who is the same age as her murdered son would have been 3.305
Acestes and Aeneas shaming an old champion into fighting in their games 5.389
the throwaway remark of Ascanius which has such momentous consequences 7.116
old King Evander enjoying looking upon his old friend’s son 8.152
the native’s abuse of foreigners 9.598
the glorious death of Mezentius and his horse at 10.858
the fussing of the doctor as he fails to treat Aeneas’s arrow wound 12.387

The Aeneid presents a ‘heroic’ view of life i.e. all the characters are super-lifesize – but it is also full of these realistic human moments. So its depiction of timeless themes of human suffering, combined with these insights into human nature mean that, even after 2,000 years, it is still not out of date.

Virgil and Augustus

West then devotes a zippy two-thirds of a page to summarising Virgil’s life and career. For me the strong part is the confiscation of his family’s land by Octavius (unlike, Mandelbaum West doesn’t mention Virgil’s trip to Rome to beg for it to be returned) but West adds a new fact: to qualify to be a member of the Senate a Roman citizen needed to be very wealthy; when Virgil died, he had property worth ten times this wealth requirement. Being Augustus’s top poet made Virgil rich. It would be fashionably easy to despise Virgil for sucking up to Augustus, in the Aeneid as in the Eclogues and Georgics, but this would be wrong because:

After a century of violence and civil war, Augustus’s hard-won victories promised peace and moral regeneration. There was every reason to believe a genuine Golden Age was at hand. Virgil’s friend, Horace, believed just as fervently. It is reasonable enough to praise the peace-bringer.
Virgil was no superficial tyrant-pleaser. He had a deep appreciation of the countryside and traditions of a much wider definition of Italy (his upbringing on a farm outside Mantua). He knew it had taken hard fighting to secure peace and would take hard work to create this Golden Age. I like the way West says Virgil didn’t have the answers to these questions and he didn’t even pose the questions. He told an exciting story and lets the story raise, at numerous points, thoughts and questions about love of country, love of family, and what it means to fight for peace. The critique is buried deeply within the narrative.
West draws a distinction between praise and flattery. The Aeneid praises Augustus in two ways: first, it tells the story of his heroic ancestor, in such a way as to reflect well on the emperor. The second way is the direct references to Augustus at key moments of prophecy and prediction.

West’s approach to translation

Finally, a page about the translation itself. Interestingly, West says that up to his time the W.F. Jackson Knight translation (whose introduction I have considered at length) had been the gold standard English translation of the Aeneid. However, it suffers from two weaknesses and that is why it is now being replaced: 1. The prose is old fashioned 2. It follows the original Latin very slavishly, often to the detriment of good sense.

So West is setting out to right the balance, to try and capture some of the allusive, changing poetry of the original – but never at the expense of – and while always writing –good, muscular, rhythmic, expressive English prose. In my opinion, he succeeds very well (see examples, below).

As you can tell, West’s introduction is far and away the best of the three for its complete absence of swank and bullshit, for its brevity, for telling you just enough to warm you up – and then pitching the reader straight into the narrative.

I enjoyed his translation more than the others for the same reason. It is straight-talking, clear and to the point. But it also, despite being in prose, includes subtle effects of alliteration, assonance and rhythm.

Disagreement

Blazing with rage, he plunged the blade full into his enemy’s breast….(Book 12)

But even with West I disagree. He says the poem is a vision of ‘a search for peace and order for Rome and humanity’. Is it, though? The Aeneid portrays a universe of anger and death and ends with a brutal act of murder. All three of these translators, in their introductions, are inexplicably drawn to praise the humanism and sweet sadness of Virgil’s poem. I know what they mean, the sadness is there and is sometimes a very dominant mood. But the narrative is also splattered with blood, the blood of hundreds of men hacked to pieces in battle, the ravening fury of Juno and her agents, screeching harpies, the foul dira, and the stink of the hundreds which are barbarously slaughtered at altars, their hot blood spurting out onto the hungry earth.

Yes, there’s a gentle tone of sweet sadness but, for my money, all three of these translators inexplicably underplay the centrality of war and anger and death and bloodshed which run alongside and, in my opinion, overwhelm the poem’s sweet humanism.

The fact that such diametrically opposite views can be held about it makes me wonder whether, deep down, even Virgil himself knew what his great poem is actually about? What it is really saying? Despite his conscious intentions, did his poem, once he had stitched it all together, end up saying much more, and give a different impression, than he originally intended?

Samples of the translations

Which of the three translations do you prefer?

The Aeneid book 1, lines 1 to 12

Jackson Knight translation:

This is a tale of arms and of a man. Fated to be an exile, he was the first to sail from the land of Troy and reach Italy, at the Lavinian shore. He met many tribulations on his way both by land and on the ocean; high heaven willed it, for Juno was ruthless and could not forget her anger. And he had also to endure great suffering in warfare. But at last he succeeded in founding his city, and installing the gods of his race in the Latin land: and that was the origin of the Latin nation, the Lords of Alba, and the proud battlements of Rome.

Mandelbaum translation:

I sing of arms and of a man: his fate
had made him fugitive; he was the first
to journey from the coasts of Troy as far
as Italy and the Lavinian shores.
Across the lands and waters he was battered
beneath the violence of the High Ones, for
the savage Juno’s unforgetting anger;
and many sufferings were his in war–
until he brought a city into being
and carried in his gods to Latium;
from this have come the Latin race, the lords
of Alba, and the ramparts of high Rome.

West translation:

I sing of arms and of the man, fated to be an exile, who long since left the land of Troy and came to Italy to the shores of Lavinium; and a great pounding he took by land and sea at the hands of the heavenly gods because of the fierce and unforgetting anger of Juno. Great too were his sufferings in war before he could found his city and carry his gods into Latium. This was the beginning of the Latin race, the Alban fathers and the high walls of Rome.

The Aeneid, book 12, lines

Jackson Knight translation:

Aeneas stood motionless, a fierce figure in his armour; but his eyes were restless, and he checked the fall of his right arm. And now at any moment the pleas of Turnus, already working in his mind, might have prevailed on his hesitation, when suddenly, there before him, he saw slung over his shoulder the accursed baldric of Pallas and his belt, inset with the glittering rivets, which he had known of old when they belonged to his young friend whom Turnus had brought low with a wound, and overcome. This Baldric Turnus was wearing now over his own shoulder, and the trophy was fatal to him. Aeneas’ eyes drank in the sight of the spoils which revived the memory of his own vengeful bitterness. His fury kindled and, terrible in his rage, he said: ‘Are you to be stolen hence out of my grasp, you who wear spoils taken from one whom I loved? It is Pallas, only Pallas, who by this wound which I now deal makes sacrifice of you; he exacts this retribution, you criminal, from your blood.’ Saying this and boiling with rage he buried his blade full in Turnus’ breast. His limbs relaxed and chilled; and the life fled, moaning, resentful, to the Shades.

Mandelbaum translation:

Aeneas stood, ferocious in his armour;
his eyes were restless and he stayed his hand;
and as he hesitated, Turnus’s words
began to move him more and more – until
high on the Latin’s shoulder he made out
the luckless belt of Pallas, of the boy
whom Turnus had defeated, wounded, stretched
upon the battlefield, from whom he took
this fatal sign to wear upon his back,
this girls glittering with familiar studs.
And when his eyes drank in this plunder, this
memorial of brutal grief, Aeneas,
aflame with rage – his wrath was terrible –
cried: ‘How can you who wear the spoils of my
dear comrade now escape me? It is Pallas
who strikes, who sacrifices you, who takes
this payment from your shameless blood.’ Relentless,
he sinks his sword into the chest of Turnus.
His limbs fell slack with chill, and with a moan
his life, resentful, fled to Shades below.

West translation:

There stood Aeneas, deadly in his armour, rolling his eyes, but he checked his hand, hesitating more and more as the words of Turnus began to move him, when suddenly his eyes caught the fatal baldric of the boy Pallas high on Turnus’s shoulder with the glittering studs he knew so well. Turnus had defeated and wounded him and then killed him, and now he was wearing his belt on his shoulder as a battle honour taken from an enemy. Aeneas feasted his eyes on the sight of this spoil, this reminder of his own wild grief, then burning with mad passion and terrible in his wrath, he cried: ‘Are you to escape me now, wearing the spoils stripped from the body of those I loved? By this wound which I now give, it is Pallas who makes sacrifice of you. It is Pallas who exacts the penalty of your guilty blood.’ Blazing with rage, he plunged the blade full into his enemy’s breast. The limbs of Turnus were dissolved in cold and his life left him with a groan, fleeing in anger down to the shades.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Introductions to the Aeneid – 1. W.F. Jackson Knight

‘The best poem of the best poet’
(John Dryden on Virgil’s Aeneid)

I own three English translations of the Aeneid:

the 1956 Penguin Classics prose translation by W.F. Jackson Knight
the 1970 verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum
the 1991 Penguin Classics prose translation by David West

The next three blog posts consist of detailed analyses of the introductions to each of these translations. The third one, about David West’s introduction, also gives examples of each of the translators’ work.

1956 introduction by W.F. Jackson Knight

William Francis Jackson Knight (1895 to 1964) was an English classical scholar. After private school and Oxford he served in the First World War where he was badly wounded. You would expect this to give him to give him special insight into the brutal fighting in the Aeneid but it doesn’t. After returning to civilian life he taught Classics at another private school for ten years before securing a place at a university (Exeter) in 1936. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1945 and spent 4 years doing a translation of his beloved Aeneid, which was published by Penguin in 1954.

There’s a very full Wikipedia article about him. In it a contemporary, M.L. Clarke, is quoted as saying of him:

‘Knight had little gift for sustained and coherent argument and exposition, and he could, under the influence of whatever book or article he had just been reading, write what can only be described as nonsense.’

With friends like that… Even more striking, we learn that in later life Knight became consumed by a belief in spiritualism:

‘When he began his Penguin Aeneid translation, T.J. Haarhoff, ‘who had for years claimed spirit-contacts with Vergil himself…now put his powers at Jack’s service’… Vergil visited Haarhoff ‘every Tuesday evening’ and wrote out answers to questions raised by Knight, whom Vergil regularly called ‘Agrippa.’ ‘He still does,’ writes Haarhoff in January 1968… Vergil then began to contact Knight ‘directly at Exeter’ warning him ‘to go slow and be extra careful about the “second half.”‘ Knight gratefully dedicated his [Penguin] translation to Haarhoff. After Knight’s death … Haarhoff [was] assured by a medium that ‘Vergil met him when he went over.’ (Reminiscences of W.M. Calder, 1977)

So some aspects of Jackson Knight’s Penguin translation are influenced by what he thought Virgil told him. In person. This is a more interesting fact than anything in Jackson Knight’s introduction.

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Jackson Knight’s 20-page introduction to his translation of Aeneid is typical of a type of old bufferish, old fashioned, romantic, wishy-washy, gushing, hero worshipping and idea-free literary criticism which surrounded me as a boy in the 1960s. I read it before I read the Wikipedia article and so took JK’s frequent mentions of ‘the beyond’ and ‘eternal truths’ and the ‘deep truth’ and ‘truth to life’ to refer to Christian beliefs. Reading the Wikipedia section about his increasing obsession with spiritualism makes sense of the entire orientation of his introduction which is to make Virgil a great teacher of eternal values etc, and to take a soft-lens, romanticising view, emphasising Virgil’s gentleness and sweetness of spirit and thus completely ignoring the testosterone-fuelled hyper-masculine anger and violence which dominates the actual poem, rather than his rose-tinted version of it.

Here’s a summary of key points:

Jackson Knight calls the Aeneid the ‘gateway between the pagan and the Christian centuries’. ‘Virgil is the poet of the Gate.’

Rome rose from being an obscure town in the middle of Italy to running an empire which stretched all round the Mediterranean, slowly and arduously, over a period of some 500 years of continuous warfare.

As the Republic reached its height it was undermined by unparalleled wealth and bitter rivalries for power. Romans who lived through the increasing political violence of the last 50 years of the Republic (which is generally thought to have ended in 27 BC) looked back at what they took to be the noble virtues of their predecessors, their courage, their nobility, their civic high-mindedness. Educated Romans became increasingly interested in antiquarianism and the study of their city’s roots. By going right back to the very original roots of the city, by moulding a new, vastly powerful version of legends about Prince Aeneas of Troy, Virgil distilled this nostalgia and these feelings for a better, nobler world, into imperishable art – and helped to pass it on to the new Christian culture which began to rise soon after his death (in 19 BC). [This is all wish fulfilment. Obviously Christianity didn’t exist until after Jesus was executed in 33 AD, or until Paul began formulating his theories about it in the 40s, and was just one obscure oriental sect among many until well into the second century AD.]

It was on a journey accompanying Augustus to Greece that Virgil fell ill and died, aged just 51. He wished his literary executors, Varius and Tucca, to destroy the Aeneid but they talked him out of it. [The poem is, in my opinion, visibly unfinished, both in structure and many details, but thank God they succeeded.]

Jackson Knight (JK) rather naively claims that Virgil foresaw that Augustus would bring the Roman world peace and order, and supported him. That said, it may be one can read subtle criticisms of Augustus’ early brutal methods in some of Virgil’s poetry. JK optimistically says the influence of gentle Virgil and his friend, Horace, may have helped reform Augustus in later life. [Naiveté and rosy-tinted optimism are Jackson Knight’s key notes.]

JK thinks the Eclogues are full of charming thoughts and imagery. [It was reading statements like this that for years gave me a completely misleading impression of the Eclogues, which in actual fact contain passage of bitterness and emotional turmoil.]

JK’s description of the Georgics as ‘poetry of the farm’ containing advice to farmers about crops, trees and animals also omits the harsh punitive tone of some of them, the descriptions of total war, of a devastating plague, a denunciation of sexual passion, and the long mini epic which takes up half the fourth Georgic. Nothing at all of ‘the poetry of the farm’ about any of these bits.

JK limply defines an epic poem as a long narrative poem full of action which tells us about human life and makes us think about the relation between man and superhuman powers; featuring ‘heroes’ who are above ordinary mortals in skill and strength, while not being divine.

Epic poems consist of two types: oral poems developed by illiterate cultures; and written poems composed in literate cultures, but usually copying the form and conventions of their oral predecessors.

The legend that Aeneas escaped the sack of Troy, sailed the seas to Latium and founded a settlement near modern Rome was ancient. Virgil rewrote it at epic length for his own purposes.

JK points out, pretty obviously, that the entire story is threaded with divine appearances and admonitions with commands, advice and help from various gods. They work through dreams, visions, omens, the worlds of prophets and clairvoyants. Virgil gives the impression of literally believing the human world is subject to the powers of another world. [I wonder whether JK was a Christian. I wonder whether this is why he describes the poem in such positive glowing terms, ignoring the rage and hatred and bitterness and destruction.]

JK is confident that everything in the poem is ‘true to life’, as if that is the measure of an epic poem, when, quite obviously, the opposite is true. From its characters to its diction an epic poem is meant to be a supremely heightened and idealised vision of the lives of gods and heroes.

JK thinks the Aeneid contains many moral messages [as literary critics in the 1950s optimistically believed literature, in general, did.] He thinks the poem displays a Greek moral – avoid excess – and a Roman one – be true (to gods, homeland, family). This is a neat antithesis, but very simplistic.

Thus JK interprets book 4, the love affair with Dido, as describing an unwise relapse by both the protagonists into excessive love, which led them both to abandon their duties to their people and cities, and then led to an excessive counter-reaction when she killed herself at being jilted.

A comparable example of excess occurs at the bitter end of the poem when Aeneas lets his instinct for moderation and forgiveness be overwhelmed by bitterness at Turnus for killing sweet Pallas. This so blinds him with anger that he slaughters his opponent instead of forgiving him.

Following straight on from this observation, JK rather contradicts himself by going on to talk about Virgil’s sweetness and tenderness. He points out, accurately enough, that this quality can sometimes be found in the epic similes which sometimes provide homely human or natural imagery to counterpoint the extreme emotions of fierce battles. He singles out the epic simile which compares Vulcan hammering out the armour for Aeneas to a humble housewife who works all night weaving (8.407 to 415). JK says this is typical of the way Virgil’s deeper meanings ‘softly’ emerge from the text. [It’s a very tendentious example, because many of Virgil’s similes are the opposite of gentle and soft, and depict destructive natural forces, rampaging gods or wild animals.]

As an example of the subtlety and depth Virgil brings to so many aspects of the story, JK compares it with another poem which describes the sack of Troy which was published during his lifetime. In this one, Menelaus comes across Helen hiding from the attacking Greeks and is tempted to kill her – but Venus intervenes to say what a waste that would be since she will still make a perfectly good wife. JK says this is simple and blunt, almost humorously practical and limited.

But in Virgil’s version, it is Aeneas who comes across Helen hiding from the ransack and is momentarily tempted to kill her. By changing the male protagonist of this moment, the scene is transformed and now becomes charged with all kinds of poignancy, Aeneas having all kinds of mixed feelings about the woman responsible for the destruction of everything he holds dear. Then, when Venus intervenes, it is not just as the love goddess as she is in the earlier version, but as Aeneas’s mother, counselling motherly tenderness. She says no humans are to blame for any of this, not Helen nor Paris: it is entirely the gods’ concoction. Thus Venus evokes a complex broil of emotions in Aeneas to turn away anger and bring forgiveness. I thought JK is a Christian because he says this reimagined scene has ‘a moral depth and a certain universality which are almost Christian’ (page 16) and claims that Virgil gets ‘nearer to ultimate truth’ than any poet before him. JK is concerned to make Virgil a sensitive spiritual person, like himself.

JK goes on to generalise about the nature of great poetry. He claims the great poets collect an ‘enormous amount of observations of life’ and then condense it under strong pressure so that when they compose even a few words, they have a great power of suggestion and persuasion. JK claims this is one way in which Virgil developed a style capable of communicating ‘universal truth’.

And it is this which allowed Virgil to condense into a single statement the experience of many generations, in fact of the entire civilisations of the Greeks and the Romans.

JK elaborates this thought by pointing out that Virgil read very widely and remembered everything he read, and so was able to ‘keep in touch with’ many people, past and present, and ‘be friends with them’. [It feels mean ganging up on a man who was severely injured in the Great War, but this is baby talk.]

Thus JK claims Virgil ‘lived in an ideal world of poetry’. He reorganised the existing ‘poetic thought-world’. Which is why his poetry is so allusive, and works on so many levels.

JK then declines into the kind of hero worship which afflicts so much older Shakespeare criticism. He claims Virgil was sensitive ‘to all points of view’ and all kinds of people, ‘even wicked ones’. Only he could reach the underlying sense of his story. His allusive method helped him tell ‘the truth of art’ not ‘the trivial truth of fact’ [a trite antithesis which, I think, comes from F.R. Leavis].

JK claims Virgil created portraits with a few ‘inspired brush strokes’ rather than detailed realism showing every wrinkle.

Virgil’s wide reading meant that every line and character and plot development contains multiple references to all previous narratives. Thus Virgil’s Aeneas contains bits of the Aeneas who appears in Homer, plus aspects of Homer’s Achilles, Odysseus, Hector, some of Hercules, and also flashes of Augustus.

JK says Virgil uses ‘hundreds’ of phrases of Epicurus in the Aeneid but violently disagreed with Epicurus’s fiercely materialistic philosophy and so sometimes uses Epicurus’s phrases to describe the idealist notions of his philosophical enemy, Plato.

He describes the way the golden bough which Aeneas has to find and pluck in order to visit the underworld almost certainly is a quote from a Greek poem published during Virgil’s lifetime, in which the works of Plato are described as a ‘golden bough, sparkling all round with every virtue’. JK says this is indicative of the importance, for Virgil, of moral goodness leading to ‘spiritual discernment’. [Recurrence of JK’s central obsession with morality and spirituality.]

Virgil spent 11 years writing the Aeneid. He intended to devote a further 3 years to revising it, but died before he could do so. He was a perfectionist. Sometimes he wrote only one line a day. JK points out there are many places in the poem which require a final revision and completion, places where ‘a period of time or a distance’ contradicts what he says elsewhere. [I’ve flagged up some of these discrepancies in my summaries.]

There are discrepancies of fact, like how the Trojans managed to transport the vast amount of treasure and household gods and fabrics and so on which are regularly described, in just 20 ships which they knocked together after the sack of Troy. The reason is the imagery and symbolism are more important than any practical consideration. After all [JK banally comments] it’s not as if anyone believes any of this is true!

And the battle scenes sometimes contain irreconcilable details, techniques and weapons. Specifically, sometimes the warriors fight like Homeric heroes, sometimes like Caesar’s legions. This anachronism, says JK, is deliberate. Virgil is like a portrait painter who tries to capture not the face in front of him but all previous stages of the sitter’s life. And so his poem tries to capture all previous phases of warfare, up to and including the present, in so doing reaching down to show ‘what all war is like.’

The reader new to epic poetry may be taken aback by the exaggerations, of the heroes’ size and strength. But JK hastens to assure us these are not ‘childish’, no, no, they are ‘serious and important symbolic means’ ‘for expressing deep and true meanings.’

[By this stage you can see how JK’s fetishising of the concept of the ‘true’, assigning it ‘depth’ and ‘universal’ meaning, are a kind of magnet. Whatever point he sets out to make, his discourse is drawn back to the magnetic pole of what a genius Virgil is, how he expresses ‘deep’ and ‘universal’ truths. How these truths anticipate the ‘universal truth’ of Christianity. How he encapsulates all time, how he understands all types of people. This is, to be blunt, an inadequate mental system or ideology with which to describe such a vast multifaceted work of art. It is sentimental because it keeps relapsing back into the same comforting hymns of praise. Often JK’s introduction reads like a eulogy. It is more compliments than criticism, in any analytical sense.]

JK picks two moments which distinguish the two protagonists: Turnus holds a bowl of water and it boils over into steam. He is too fiery. Aeneas hold a bowl of water and it reflects rays of light off it; as the water settles the rays settle. Turnus is described as emitting flames and sparks when he gets ferocious for battle. He will burn bright and burn out.

JK points to the many descriptions of dawn or nightfall to illustrate how Virgil used the same basic event but cast it in an infinite variety of words, the start or endings of words being chosen for their sound and how they complement similar words nearby.

Virgil employed several types of rhythm, some governed by long and short syllables, some by stress accents, some by vowel sounds. The delicate interplay of these different systems across numerous lines creates ‘the music of Virgil’.

The translator knows more than anyone that Virgil’s art is subtle because it is often difficult to understand exactly what he means. Often his elliptical and allusive statements need to be expanded in prose in order to convey the full richness of implication and the challenge for the translator is knowing when to hold back and not fully explicate the allusions or implications which he is aware of.

JK tells us Virgil is capable of great variety of tone from ‘apocalyptic majesty’ to a ‘still, small voice’ [characteristic of JK to use a Christian phrase]. Virgil’s general tone is of dignity and formality but he sometimes uses colloquialism and, rarely, something like slang.

The aim of JK’s translation is to let the story tell itself in an impersonal English, removing his own personal style as much as anyone can. But oddities are sometimes permitted because Virgil himself is sometimes ‘odd’. In his day, using Latin for literature was still experimental and hadn’t become as smooth as it was to be even a generation later, for Ovid, for example. It is hard to know exactly how some of the unevennesses in his poems were received in his time, and so difficult to know exactly how to translate them in modern English.

Suddenly JK switches tack from a narrow consideration of Latin style to consider the poem’s place in the entire Western tradition. He announces that the Aeneid was the principle and best known secular book in the Western world. Soon after his death, Virgil began to be worshipped as a divinity. He was awarded a place in Christian worship and art as soon as such things came to be arranged. His imagery in the Eclogues – the picture of a shepherd sitting under a tree piping love songs – influenced every European literature.

The compactness of some of Virgil’s sayings led to the Sortes Vergilianae, where people opened a page of Virgil at random and place their finger blindly on the text and then interpreted its secret meaning. Apparently, Charles I did this before the Battle of Naseby.

On the final page JK’s introduction collapses into hero-worshipping cliché and waffle. ‘The power of Virgil’s poem is like a seed in the ground pushing up into the light; and it is still growing‘ – the force of that last clause meant to convey the impression that the author is ‘still growing’ with it, as if he is part of this great triumphal procession. This is high-sounding bilge.

JK notes that some critics, even in Virgil’s day, wrote against him – this could be interesting if JK quoted any of them and explained what Virgil’s critics said against him, but instead JK collapses into inexcusably weak poetic prose, here, as throughout his introduction, preferring his high-sounding references and allusions to any solid ideas or analysis. Yes, there have been critics of his adored hero, but:

disparagement of Virgil’s overwhelming reputation has always sooner or later collapsed like the walls of Jericho.

This is brainless hero worship. JK compounds this descent into humanistic hogwash by saying it is likely that ‘Virgil, the poet of fidelity, still likes mankind’s fidelity to him‘. This is dire sentimentality devoid of meaning or interest.

In the short introduction to his thorough and useful glossary (pages 343 to 361) JK makes the interesting point that the Aeneid contains nearly 900 names, most of them names of human beings or divinities, though many are place names. Typical of JK not to be precise enough to say how many in each category, which might have led onto interesting analysis. Interesting but doesn’t follow through.

Summary

Over-ripe, out-of-date impressionistic tripe, all-too-pleased with the sound of its own references (the walls of Jericho etc), while palming the reader off with hardly any hard ideas and a dogged determination to make Virgil sound like a gentle, high-minded spiritualist instead of the far more complex, contradictory, daunting and unpleasant poet he actually is, Jackson Knight’s introduction is a typical slice of the high-minded tripe which dominated conservative criticism in the 1950s and 60s.

Roman reviews

All my Roman reviews

The Aeneid by Virgil – books 1 to 3

I am Aeneas, known for my devotion. (Aeneid book 1, line 378)

I own three translations of the Aeneid:

the 1956 Penguin Classics prose translation by W.F. Jackson Knight
the 1971 verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum
the 1991 Penguin Classics prose translation by David West

I read most of the Aeneid in the West prose translation. It seemed easy and modern. I dipped into the Mandelbaum but was put off by his tone, too hectically American, maybe because I read it at the height of the heatwave when everything felt a bit hysterical. But I did use Mandelbaum’s comprehensive Glossary of Names and Places. The West edition doesn’t have a glossary or any notes at all. The idea is for you to rely entirely on the information Virgil gives in the poem itself which, it turns out, is all you need, most of the time.

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, generally referred to as Virgil (70 to 19 BC) was the great Roman poet who straddled the epochal transition from the Roman Republic to the early Roman Empire. There were other very important figures, such as Catullus from the generation before (b.84), Virgil’s younger contemporary, Horace (b.63 BC), and, a generation younger, the great poet of mythology, Ovid (b.43). But Virgil towers above them all.

Virgil was born near the northern city of Mantua to parents who owned farmland. He was sent to Rome to complete his education where he probably met the young Augustus (63 BC to 14 AD) and his friends, namely his future patron and Augustus’s ‘minister of culture’, Maecenas (68 to 8 BC).

Always a sickly, sensitive young man, Virgil left Rome and settled near Naples where he spent the rest of his life quietly studying and writing poetry.

Virgil left no juvenilia or collections of random poems. He wrote just three works, each of them masterpieces:

the ten very short and highly stylised poems of idealised country life featuring lovelorn shepherds, the Eclogues
the four longer, tougher-minded, sometimes lyrical, sometimes practical, sometimes sweepingly destructive Georgics, are, on paper, poems of advice to farmers and livestock owners, but in reality a lot more varied and complex than that
the long epic poem the Aeneid, which has a claim to being the most important and most influential poem ever written in Europe

Epic poem

An epic poem is a long poem with a historical or legendary setting, which usually tells the adventures of one or more heroes on an epic journey or pitched into a mighty struggle, all with the input of gods and goddesses. Many societies and cultures have produced epic poems.

Sometimes an epic poem has as part of its purpose to explain the origin of cities or races or gods and religions. (The Greeks had a word for such an origin story, an aition.) Always epics are characterised by long narratives with multiple incidents or episodes strung along the central plot.

In the 1940s C.S. Lewis proposed an elemental distinction between primary and secondary epic. Primary epic is produced in illiterate cultures, often by travelling poets or troubadors, often using familiar narratives, well-known characters and using time-honoured, stock descriptions. The process by which they’re written down is obscure but by the time they are recorded they already display very sophisticated techniques of oral storytelling. In our European tradition, the two Greek epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey show these characteristics. They are attributed to a figure called ‘Homer’ but it’s not certain that anyone named Homer ever existed.

By complete contrast, secondary epic is the production of a literate culture. It is the product of known authors, was written at a known time and place. It self-consciously invokes many of the tropes and techniques of primary epic, such as well-known legends and legendary characters, famous episodes or adventures, extended similes, stock descriptive phrases, episodic structure and so on. Virgil’s Aeneid has a good claim to be the greatest secondary epic.

A poem of multiple levels

The Aeneid is a carefully wrought collation of numerous themes on multiple levels.

Adventure story

In terms of storyline or plot it tells the story of Aeneas, a prince of Troy – a story familiar to all educated Romans of Virgil’s day – who escapes the destruction of the city at the climax of the ten-year-long siege by the Greeks, and describes the wanderings of him and 20 shiploads of comrades as they sail west across the Mediterranean looking for a new home.

Foundation story

Why bother with this story? Because the Romans believed that their city ultimately owed its founding to prince Aeneas. The traditional view (which is recapped in book 1) goes that Aeneas underwent numerous florid adventures as he sailed west from Troy before finally making landfall in western Italy. After fighting off the local tribes he establishes a settlement at a place he calls Lavinium.

His son, Ascanius, also known as Iulus, will move their settlement to a place named Alba Longa, where his descendants will live for 300 years. Then Ilia, the royal priestess of Vesta, will be seduced and impregnated by the god Mars and give birth to twins, Romulus and Remus. Romulus will grow up to build a new settlement, named Rome after him, which will go on to rule the world.

Patriotic story

So on one level the poem is an ultra-patriotic dramatisation of the man who founds the settlement which was to form the basis of Rome. Aeneas is shown as an epitome of the Roman virtues, a man who puts duty to family and country before self.

Pleasing Augustus

Throughout the narrative Virgil goes out of his way to suck up to the current ruler of Rome, the princeps Gaius Octavianus who was awarded the title Augustus while he was composing the work. Gaius Octavianus had been adopted by Julius Caesar in his will and so took his name, becoming Gaius Julius Caesar.

Virgil is at pains to demonstrate the extreme antiquity of the family of ‘Julii’ of which Octavianus had become a member, and so goes out of his way to tell us, repeatedly, that Aeneas’s son, Ascanius, had this second name Iulus (this name had been Ilus while Troy, which was also called Ilium, had stood). Ilus – Iulus – Iulius. The aim was to create a direct link from Aeneas via Ilus-Iulius to the house of Julius Caesar, and so to the current emperor, Gaius Julius Caesar aka Augustus.

Those are the public and political aims of the poem. Two additional factors make it a masterpiece.

Adapting Homer

One is the tremendous skill with which Virgil closely models himself on the two outstanding epics of his tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, adopting the tone of voice, the capacious bird’s-eye-view of the narrator, the confident intertwining of the human level with the character of the immortal gods who play a crucial role in the plot, either supporting or scheming against Aeneas. It is a very sophisticated invocation and twining together of the epic tradition up to his time.

Virgil’s sensibility

But more important is Virgil’s sensitivity. Homer’s heroes are killing machines. They may be sad and burst into tears, but only when there is good justification (weeping over the dead) and most of the time they are just angry and keying themselves up for yet another fight.

By contrast, the Aeneid is soulful. The narrator and his hero are sensitive to ‘the tears of things’, to the tragic inevitability of the universe. Aeneas does his duty, but with a heavy heart at the suffering he has seen and the new suffering he causes. It is an epic poem with lyrical feeling.

Book 1 Storm and banquet

In the best tradition, the poem starts in media res meaning ‘in the middle of things’. We find our hero aboard ship, having set sail from Sicily towards the cost of Italy but caught up in a violent storm. His fleet is dispersed and at least one ship sinks.

In fact the read of the poem is informed that this storm has been whipped up by Juno queen of the gods. She hates Aeneas and is his steady foe. She cannot forgive the Trojans for the snub when Paris awarded the apple of beauty to Venus. This long-standing grudge is why we see her visit the home of Aeolus, gods of the winds, and ask him to whip up a storm to shipwreck Aeneas, which he promptly does.

But we also see Venus, Aeneas’s mother, who was impregnated by Aeneas’s father Anchises, rushing to confront Jupiter, king of the gods, and tearfully ask how he can let his wife massacre her son and his colleagues. Jupiter calmly tells her to dry her eyes, he has no intention of letting Aeneas drown, and it is now that he reveals what the fates have in store for the Trojan prince (as I outlined above).

And as he speaks he gets his brother Neptune, king of the seas, to abate the storm, and gently blow the remainder of Aeneas’s fleet towards the coast of north Africa, referred to here as Libya. Here the Trojans gratefully anchor, come ashore, dry off, go hunting, shoot some deer, build fires, eat and drink wine and recover their strength.

And here Aeneas is visited by his mother in the guise of a local woman who assures him all will be well and tells him about the nearby town of Carthage, just now being built by exiles from Tyre. Venus-in-disguise tells the rather complicated backstory of this people. Tyre is a rich city on the coast of Phoenicia (what is now Israel) ruled by king Pygmalion. He has a sister, princess Dido. Dido marries a rich man Sychaeus. But Pygmalion is jealous of Sychaeus’s wealth and murders him while he worships at an altar. For a while no-one knows who committed the crime and Pygmalion hypocritically comforts his sister.

But then the ghost of Sychaeus appears to Dido, reveals the truth, warns her to flee her brother, and shows her the burial place of a huge secret treasure. She gathers her friends and supporters and the many people opposed to the ‘tyrant’ Pygmalion, they dig up the treasure, load it onto some ships and sail away forever.

Now she and her people have arrived at the other end of the Mediterranean, made land, settled and Aeneas and his crew have arrived just as the Tyrians are laying out and building a new ‘city’, a city the narrative refers to as Carthage.

You don’t need to be a literary critic to spot that both Aeneas and Dido are in similar plight, both refugees from distant lands in the eastern Mediterranean, forced by tragic events to flee their home cities, and now trying to build new lives, and new cities, in the west.

All this is explained to him by Aeneas’s mother, Venus who, having intervened to save Aeneas from the storm, now appears to him in the guise of a local maiden. She has wrapped Aeneas in a magic cloud so he and his companion can walk up to the new city walls and watch the Tyrians building Carthage.

Then she disappears the cloud and Aeneas is welcomed by the Tyrians. Their queen, Dido, welcomes Aeneas and his men to a lavish feast. Venus waylays Aeneas’s son as he comes from the beach where they’ve all landed towards the city, makes him fall asleep in a copse of trees. And gets her other son, the god Eros, to take on Ascanius’s form, and be introduced to Queen Dido, and sit on her lap during the feast (!) and deliberately make her fall in love with Aeneas. Because we all know how this love affair will end Virgil describes her as poor Dido and ‘doomed’ Dido.

Homer is always full of a kind of metallic energy. Even when his heroes weep, they do so in a virile, manly way. But in his treatment of Dido Virgil displays a completely different sensibility, sympathetic and sad.

Back at the feast, Dido asks Aeneas to tell them about his adventures. He has already told them he has been wandering for seven years since the fall of Troy. Reluctantly, Aeneas agrees.

Book 2 The fall of Troy

Aeneas’s story. He cuts straight to the final days of the 10-year-long siege as the Greeks cut down mighty trees to make the enormous wooden horse. Then strike camp and sail away leaving it alone on the plain in front of Troy. The Trojans come out to admire it. The priest Laocoön warns them all that it is a Greek scam but at that point a Trojan patrol returns with a Greek captive. He tells them he’s called Sinon and, after incurring the enmity of the mighty Odysseus (here called Ulixes) he was chosen to be the human sacrifice the Greek fleet needed to set sail (just as it had required the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigeneia in order to set sail from Greece, 10 long years ago).

Sinon tells them he managed to escape the night before he was due to be killed and has hidden. Now they can kill him or spare him as they please. But he is a plant left by the Greeks to give a false explanation of the horse. He says it is a peace offering to the gods to let the fleet sail. More precisely, it is atonement for the incident when Ulixes and Diomede stole the Palladium from the temple of Pallas Athene in the citadel of Troy. Since then she has persecuted them and their chief priest, Calchas, ordered them a) to return to Greece to worship the gods, atone for their sins, rearm and return to renew the siege, and b) to build this enormous horse as a peace offering to Athena. Sinon warns that if the Trojans damage it at all it will bring down the wrath of Athena on them. If, on the other hand, they take it into the city and venerate it, then Athena will bless them and, when the Greeks return, allies from all across Asia will rally to their cause and they will defeat the Greeks in a final battle.

The Trojans are still hesitating when an amazing thing happens. The priest of Neptune, Laocoön, is sacrificing to an altar by the shore when two might sea snakes emerge from the waves and envelop his two young sons. Laocoön goes to their rescue and tries to fight them off but the snakes strangle all three to death and then slither into the city and up to the citadel of the goddess Venus.

Well, that decides it for the Trojans who set about dismantling part of their walls (the horse is too big to go through the city gates) in a kind of mad frenzy. Aeneas tells the story with much regret and sorrow at their foolhardiness, but they were whipped on by the scheming gods. The priestess Cassandra warns against letting the horse in but, of course, she was doomed never to be believed.

That night the Trojans hold a mighty feast to celebrate the end of the war then pass out on their beds. In the middle of the night Aeneas is woken by the ghost of Hector, looking grim and broken and bloody as he was after Achilles dragged his corpse round the walls of Troy, tied by the ankles to his chariot.

Hector’s ghost warns Aeneas to flee and sure enough, now he is awake, he hears screams and smells smoke. While they were asleep, Sinon snuck out to the horse, undid the pine bolts which secured its secret trap door, the Greeks inside the horse lowered themselves by a rope to the ground and set about massacring the guards set on the horse, while a contingent went and opened the main gates to the Greeks who had a) silently sailed back from where the fleet had hidden behind the offshore island of Tenedos and b) swarmed across the plain, till they were massed outside the gates.

Now the Greek army is pouring into the city determined to kill every man, woman and child. Hector’s ghost tells Aeneas all his lost, to gather his family and companions and flee, and predicts that, after long wanderings, he will found a new city.

But if you think about it, Virgil can’t depict the legendary founder of Rome as a coward who turns and bolts. Instead Aeneas leaps from his bed, grabs his armour, runs into the street, and rallies other warriors he finds emerging from their homes. They form a troop and roam through the streets taking on Greeks. They massacre one group of Greeks and put on their armour. This allows them to mingle with other Greeks before turning on them and many, the narrative assures us, they sent down to Orcus (hell), many fled back across the plain, and some even scuttled back up inside the horse.

Then a huge fight develops around the figure of the priestess Cassandra who is being dragged bound and gagged by Greeks from her temple. Aeneas and his band rally to save her but a hornet’s nest of Greeks counter attack, and they are even struck down by some Trojan brothers because they are wearing Greek armour.

He doesn’t mention Cassandra again but shifts the focus to the battle round the palace of Priam. Trojans are reduced to tearing down their walls and roofs to throw down on the Greeks climbing siege ladders. Aeneas enters the palace by a secret back passage and makes his way to the top of the tallest tower where he joins Trojans loosening the masonry to send huge blocks of stone falling on the Greek attackers.

Aeneas knows his audience will want to know how King Priam died. He gives a vivid, heart-breaking account of the old man buckling on his armour and heading for the fight, how his wife Hecuba tries to persuade him to desist, how Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, chases and kills Polites, one of Priam’s sons, right in front of him. How Priam defies him, harmlessly throws his spear, reproaches Pyrrhus for being a shame to his noble father. But Pyrrhus doesn’t care, grabs Priam by his long hair, drags him over to the altar and thrusts his sword up to the hilt in Priam’s side. Then his head is hacked from his body which is left to rot on the shore, unknown and unmourned.

Aeneas looks around and realises all his companions are dead i.e. he has done all that honour demanded. Now his thoughts turn to his aged father Anchises, his wife, Creusa, and son, Ascanius.

He spots Helen hiding in a temple, cause of all this death and destruction. Shall she survive and be taken back to Sparta to live in luxury, waited on by Trojan slaves? In a burst of fury Aeneas rushes forward to kill her but suddenly his mother, the goddess Venus appears. She tells him the war is not really Helen or even Paris’s fault. It is the gods. And she strips away the fog which clouds his mortal vision and shows him Neptune shaking the city’s foundations, Juno opening the gates and egging on the Greeks, Pallas Athena taking command of the citadel, and Jupiter himself leading the gods and supporting the Greeks. No mortal can stop this. As the Sibyl says, much later, in book 6:

You must cease to hope that the fates of the gods can be altered by prayer. (6.376)

Venus now orders Aeneas to collect his family and flee. But Anchises refuses to leave the city he has lived in all his life, determined to die in his house. Aeneas remonstrates, the old man refuses, so Aeneas says he’ll buckle back on his armour and die defending him rather than leave him. But Creusa throws herself in front of him and tells him his first duty is to his family.

At this tense moment there are signs from heaven. A heatless flame settles on Ascanius’s head and there was a peal of thunder and a star fell from the sky, a meteorite crashing down into Mount Ida.

This persuades Anchises to leave, so Aeneas puts a lion skin on his shoulders, tells the household slaves to meet them at a hill outside the city, puts his father on his shoulder, takes little Ascanius by the hand and Creusa follows behind as they set off through the dark side streets of the burning city.

It was then that his father heard marching soldiers’ feet and told Aeneas to run and Aeneas was overcome by irrational fear and bolted and somehow his wife Creusa got left behind, He never saw her again.

I stormed and raged and blamed every man and god that ever was. (2.745)

He puts his armour back on and runs back to the city, through the same gate they exited, trying to retrace his steps, going first to his house then to the palace of Priam, finding death, devastation and flames everywhere.

But then Creusa appears in a vision to him, calmly telling him that this is the wish of the gods and destiny. He is to sail far away and come to rest in Hesperia by the river Thybris in a land of warriors and take another bride. It is for the best. Their gods will protect her. She promises she will never be led away a slave for some Greek wife, although what her exact fate is is left unstated. He goes to put his arms around her but she fades like a phantom.

Anyway, this, like the account of Aeneas’s brave fighting, are obviously both designed to show him to best advantage, full of patriotic, familial and husbandly loyalty, but at every step overpowered by fate and destiny and the will of the gods. Now, sadly. Aeneas returns to the mound where his father and son are waiting and is amazed at the sheer number of other survivors who have gathered there. From now on he is to be their leader.

[Maybe worth pointing out the number of ghostly and visionary appearances: Dido’s husband’s ghost appears to her; Hector’s ghost appears to Aeneas; Creusa’s spirit appears to him. Although ostensibly about fighting there is a good deal of this otherworldly, visionary, shimmering quality about much of the story.]

Book 3 The wanderings

Aeneas is still talking, recounting his adventures to Dido and her court. He describes how the survivors built a settlement not far from ruined Troy, in the lee of the Ida mountains and built ships. Then set sail. This is described very briefly, in successive sentences. The lack of detail is very characteristic of Virgil. Unlike the hard-edged detailing of Homer, Virgil’s habit of skipping over details (for example, not telling us the outcome of the battle over Cassandra) creates a kind of shimmering, dreamy quality to the poem.

They sail to Thrace and begin to lay out foundations for a city but when Aeneas pulls up trees to decorate the altar he’s going to sacrifice on, he is horrified when they and spurt blood. Then terrified when a voice speaks and declares himself to be the spirit of Polydorus, sent by Priam to Thrace with a treasure, to be raised there, far from war-torn Troy. Now he tells Aeneas he was murdered by the king of Thrace who simply stole the gold.

Aeneas tells Anchises who responds that this is no place to stay. So they rebury the body of Polydorus with full rites, and set sail, letting the gods decide their final destination. They sail onto the island of Delos, dock in the harbour of Ortygia, and are greeted by King Anius.

Aeneas prays at the temple of Apollo, asking what he should do. A booming voice replies he must seek out the land of his ‘ancient mother’. Father Anchises interprets this to mean Crete, where the founder of Troy, Teucer, first came from.

So they sail and row from Delos via Naxos, Donusa, Olearos, Paros, through the Cyclades to Crete, where they land and begin to build a settlement Aeneas calls Pergamea. Things are just beginning to thrive when the settlement is struck down by a great plague and the crops wither in the fields.

One night the household gods are bathed in sunlight and speak to him, telling him again the prophecy that he will sail the seas, come to a peaceful land, and found a race who rule the world. The Greeks call the land Hesperia but it has been settled by the Oenetrians who have called it Italy after their god, Italus.

When he tells Father Anchises the latter remembers that Troy had two founders. One was Teucer from Crete but the other was Dardanus from Hesperia. They misinterpreted the message from Apollo and mistakenly came to Crete. So now they pack ship and set sail for Hesperia/Italy.

For three days and nights a black storm descends, blotting out the sky. Then it lifts and they sail into the harbour of the Strophades. They see fat cattle and goats and storm ashore, kill some and are feasting when they are attacked by the foul harpies, birds with the faces of girls, bellies oozing filth, talons like birds, which tear the food from their hands.

The harpies’ leader, Celaeno, perches on a pinnacle of rock and announces a prophecy which Jupiter gave Apollo, and Apollo gave her, and she is now giving the Trojans. They will settle a new land but not until they have passed through a famine which makes them gnaw their tables. (The prophesy is fulfilled at 7.116 to 130.)

So the Trojans abandon the feast and the land, take ship and scud over the waves to the island of Leucas. Here they performed rites of purification and then held games. They stayed here till mid-winter, when Aeneas pinned a shield taken from a Greek on the temple doors and they set sail again.

They dock at Chaonia and walk up to the city of Buthrotum. Here they are astounded to come across Andromache, wife of the great hero Hector, making ritual sacrifices for her dead husband. She tells them that she survived the sack of Troy and was taken as wife by Pyrrhus to whom she bore a child. But Pyrrhus dumped her on fellow slave Helenus (one of the sons of Priam) in order to marry Hermione. But Orestes loved Hermione and so murdered Pyrrhus. At his death some of Pyrrhus’s land descended to Helenus. He built a settlement there, a new Pergamum, and here Andromache lives.

At which point Helenus arrives and, amid much weeping by everyone, escorts them to his city which is a miniature copy of Troy in all aspects. They stay for some time. Eventually Aeneas asks the priest Helenus to answer his questions: should he set sail, will he come to the promised land?

So Helenus sacrifices some bullocks and then gives Aeneas the latest in the line of prophecies, first of all warning it won’t be a short voyage, but a long one fraught with adventures. He will recognise the place to build his city because he will find a sow suckling 30 piglets. He must make it a priority to worship Juno and try to win her over. He must make time to visit the prophetess at Cumae. He must avoid sailing through the straits of Messina, which are terrorised by Scylla and Charybdis.

Helenus gives them gifts of gold and ivory and silver, and blesses them as they set sail. They sight Italy and sail into harbour. They sail on past Tarentum in the instep of Italy. They sail past the gulf of Scylla and Charybdis and make shore in the land of the Cyclopes, a peaceful harbour but in the shadow of the fearsome Mount Etna who belching black smoke darkens the sky.

Next morning they are surprised to see a wretched filthy man in rags come running towards them. He announces he is Achaemenides, one of Ulixe’s crew. He describes how they were captured by the Cyclops which ate some of their comrades, drank and fell asleep and how, in the night, they conspired to blind him. But they sailed and left him behind. He has just about survived for three months, since then. But he warns them to flee.

At that moment they see blinded Polyphemus appear with his flocks on the side of the mountain and run down to their ships and set sail, rowing for all they’re worth. Polyphemus hears them and lets out a road which shakes the earth and brings all the other cyclops to the shore to rage at them, but they are clear of harm.

They sail down the east coast of Sicily past Syracuse. Then along the south coast, ticking off all the settlements and sights till they come to Lilybaeum. They put in at Drepanum but here Aeneas ‘lost’ his father Anchises. There is, as so often with Virgil, no detail, no explanation, just a focus on Aeneas’s loss and sadness.

When they set sail from there to head north and east to the Italian coast the great storm described at the start of book 1 was stirred up and so they were blown to the African shore which the Tyrians are settling. And with that, Aeneas’s recital of his story comes to an end.

Epicurean rest

It is noticeable that Virgil/West phrase the very end of Aeneas’s recital with ‘Here he made an end and was at peace.’ When I read Virgil’s Georgics I was struck by how much he told us he was struggling to complete the poem. He had to ask his patron, Maecenas, for help and support, he kept telling himself ‘onwards and upwards!’, he wrote with relief about reaching the end of each of the four books. Then the very opening of book 4 describes how Dido fell in love and ‘love gave her body no rest or peace‘.

It was only when I read the Georgics that I became aware for the first time of Virgil’s adherence to the teachings of Epicurus. In the blurb to the Penguin edition, I learn that Virgil lived most of his adult life in an Epicurean colony near Naples.

Epicurus’s teachings are above all designed to cultivate freedom from stress and anxiety in his followers. Peace of mind and spirit. So these references in the Aeneid to peace of spirit, or lack of it, acquired, for me, two deeper resonances. On one level, Virgil uses the word ‘peace’ to mean an end to the gruelling torment of writing this long, demanding poem, which comes over as being a huge ordeal for him. But the word also means far more than it does to you or me – for the Epicurean Virgil, ‘peace’ represents the nirvana, the blessed state sought for by his philosophy. When he says his characters achieve ‘peace’ or, conversely, are deprived of ‘peace’, it isn’t in the casual way that you or I might use the word, but has this much deeper resonance, referring to a philosophically idealised state of complete detachment from all sources of strife or worry.

Looked at this way, the entire poem represents a kind of vast detour from man’s ideal condition of rest or stasis, into a world of strife and anxiety. It helps to explain Virgil’s sad and doleful tone, lamenting the endless destiny of man to be troubled – by duties, responsibilities, the need to work, to eat, to love, to be a social animal – all of it endlessly distracting from his best, optimum state of complete Buddhist detachment. Hence Virgil’s insistent tone of lamentation over humanity in general, continually remarking on the sadness of their poor mortal existence.

It was the time when sleep, the most grateful gift of the gods, was first beginning to creep over suffering mortals… (2.270)

I guess there’s a third interpretation which is literally to do with rest after physical labour. This harks back to the many images in the Georgics of the sheer amount of physical labour involved in human existence. How many times in that long book did weary shepherds, farmers, goatherds, horticulturalists and livestock herders and outdoor workers greet the end of the day, the westering of the sun, as a welcome sign of the end of their day’s labours. Well, that tone is repeated again and again in the Aeneid. Night and, with it, sleep, represent welcome oblivion for animals and humans exhausted by their labours.

It was night and weary living things were peacefully taking their rest upon the earth. (4.522)

It was night and over the whole earth the weary animals, all manner of birds and all manner of flocks, were already deep in sleep.. (8.28)

Over the whole world the creatures of the earth were relaxed in sleep, all resting from their cares, and their hearts had forgotten their labours… (9.226)

Contrasting with the mellifluous descriptions of restful sleep are the hard descriptions of the scenes of fighting and the days of war (especially in the harsh, second half of the Aeneid, which I’ll be discussing in a later blog post).

Bitter grief was everywhere. Everywhere there was fear and death in many forms. (2.369)

Aurora meanwhile had lifted up her life-giving light for miserable mortals, bringing back their toil and sufferings. (11.184)

As an English poet wrote, 1,600 years later:

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.

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by Simon on August 29, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Literature, Poetry, Translation

Tagged Achaemenides, adventure, Aeneas, Aeolus, Agamemnon, Alba Longa, Allen Mandelbaum, Anchises, ancient Rome, Andromache, Apollo, Ascanius, Augustus, Æneid, Buddhism, Buthrotum, C.S. Lewis, Calchas, Cassandra, Catullus, Celaeno, Chaonia, Crete, Creusa, Cumae, Dardanus, David West, Delos, destiny, Dido, Diomede, Donusa, Drepanum, Eclogues, epic poem, epic poetry, Epicurus, Fate, Father Anchises, Foundation story, Gaius Julius Caesar, Gaius Octavianus, Georgics, ghosts, gods, Greek mythology, harpies, Hector, Helen, Helenus, Hermione, Hesperia, Homer, Horace, Ilia, Iliad, Ilus, Iphigeneia, Italus, Italy, Iulus, Julius Caesar, Juno, Jupiter, King Anius, King Priam, Laocoön, Lavinium, Leucas, Libya, Lilybaeum, love, Maecenas, makars, Mantua, Mars, Mount Etna, Mount Ida, Naples, Naxos, Neptune, North Africa, Odysseus, Odyssey, Oenetrians, Olearos, Orcus, Orestes, Ortygia, Ovid, Palladium, Pallas Athene, Paris, Paros, Pergamea, Phoenicia, poetry, Polydorus, Polyphemus, Priam, Publius Vergilius Maro, Pygmalion, Pyrrhus, river Thybris, Roman literature, Roman poetry, Romulus and Remus, Scylla and Charybdis, Sicily, Sinon, spirits, Straits of Messina, Sychaeus, Syracuse, Tarentum, Teucer, the Cyclades, the Cyclopes, The fall of Troy, the Strophades, The trojan war, Thrace, Translation, Trojan horse, Trojan War, Troy, Tyre, Ulixes, Venus, Virgil, W.F. Jackson Knight

Posted by Simon on August 29, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/08/29/the-aeneid-virgil-books-1-to-3/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged W.F. Jackson Knight

Virgil and the Christian World by T.S. Eliot (1951)

T.S. Eliot: a potted biography

Virgil and the Christian World

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Introductions to the Aeneid – 3. David West

1991 Penguin classics prose translation by David West

1. The origins of Rome

2. Aeneas an emblem of the refugee from war

3. Virgil’s humanity

Virgil and Augustus

West’s approach to translation

Disagreement

Samples of the translations

The Aeneid book 1, lines 1 to 12

The Aeneid, book 12, lines

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Introductions to the Aeneid – 1. W.F. Jackson Knight

1956 introduction by W.F. Jackson Knight

Summary

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The Aeneid by Virgil – books 1 to 3

Virgil

Epic poem

A poem of multiple levels

Adventure story

Foundation story

Patriotic story

Pleasing Augustus

Adapting Homer

Virgil’s sensibility

Book 1 Storm and banquet

Book 2 The fall of Troy

Book 3 The wanderings

Epicurean rest

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