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Overview
Originally published in 1987.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691609737 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #786 |
| Pages: | 270 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Virgil's Elements
Physics and Poetry in the Georgics
By David O. Ross Jr.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1987 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06699-8
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Virgil is by no means an easy poet. The Odyssey is read by school children, and the Iliad can be understood by the average college student more easily and (I think) more accurately than any other work of classical literature likely to be encountered in survey courses. The Aeneid, however, often seems tedious and mechanical to these same students and more often than not frustrates the lecturer who tries to convey to a general audience some idea of the depth and beauty of Virgil's verse and the poem's profound power over mind and emotions. Yet the Aeneid is far better understood, and more readable, than the Georgics, and the Georgics than the Eclogues. Why is Virgil so difficult, but less so from work to work? One answer can be had by setting the periods of his creative life against the history of his time.
The experience of Virgil's youth was of bloody civil war and political chaos, but his maturity coincided with unexpected, and almost unhoped for, stability in the Roman state. Virgil, born in 70 B.C., was twenty-one when Caesar crossed the Rubicon: he had thus grown up knowing only political uncertainty, and though rural Mantua must have been far more peaceful than the streets of the capital city (which, in the middle fifties, were the scene of increasing violence, terrorized by armed gangs of political thugs), the years of the First Triumvirate made it clear throughout Italy that balanced power must soon become unbalanced and that armies, controlled by individuals, had supplanted reasonable authority, whether the Senate's or the People's. When Virgil was thirty, he had (we can presume) been working on his Eclogues for two years: Caesar had, over five years, emerged victorious in protracted battles over Pompey and the state, and had been murdered; the Second Triumvirate had proclaimed its purposes and principles most clearly by its notorious proscriptions (300 senators and 2,000 knights were murdered, according to one ancient estimate; in December of 43 B.C. Cicero's head and hands decorated the Rostra, from which recently he had spoken out against Antony to the people in the forum). When the Eclogues were finished (in 35 B.C., as now appears probable), a Roman army was again preparing, inevitably, to face a Roman army: again political chaos was to find resolution only through armed conflict. Civil war had come to seem a curse inherited from the fratricidal foundation of the city. In the Eclogues there is little certainty, and what little there is exists only in an idealized world that has barely the substance of a dream. Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi ...: Tityrus has his farm and peace, but where is he?
In September of 31 B.C., when the battle of Actium left the world with a single leader, Virgil had been writing the Georgics for four years, and, though he had enjoyed the patronage of Maecenas during these years, we should not imagine that Octavian's victory filled him at the time with either hope or joy unbounded. The reality of a single man, with a single army, must have been unsettling at best, and in reality, too, this was the man of the proscriptions of 43. Octavian remained away from Rome until the summer of 29, when he returned to celebrate the triple triumph and when no one, still, could have felt much certainty about the future — other than to acknowledge that opposition was no longer possible. If this was peace, it must have seemed only the result of desolation, already a particularly Roman accomplishment. These were the years of the Georgics, a poem concerned above all with irrational destruction, with uneasy balances between opposing elements, and with the unreality of hopeful visions.
The Aeneid, still without Virgil's finishing touches at his death in 19 B.C., is the product of the years of slow realization that peace was a fact, that the Pax Augusta had brought the blessed calm of a spring day even to Rome itself. Virgil, though, and Horace, were never able to trust this peace — their own experience had been so different, and they knew too well what it had cost and how it had been achieved: in the Aeneid we hear of peace and order, but always in the future; Aeneas' experience is otherwise, from beginning to end.
This brief reminder of Virgil's times may serve two purposes. First, we must always be aware, when reading the "Augustan" poets, that the experience of the older poets (Virgil and Horace) was totally different from that of Propertius or Tibullus, and again from that of Ovid, who was born in 43 B. c. and thus knew only Augustan peace and stability. Much of what is still written about Virgil (and especially about the Aeneid) neglects entirely the experience of his first forty years, as if he had lived in Victorian England or grown up during the Eisenhower administration. I admit to reading Virgil as a poet of deep pessimism: I cannot see that it could be otherwise.
Second, if we try to understand what Virgil had known and experienced while writing the Eclogues, then the Georgics, and then the Aeneid, we can see how his poetry becomes, outwardly at least, more understandable. His world began in chaos, with uncertainty and random violence; understanding was possible only by imposing abstract patterns upon disorder, the result of which was far removed from observable reality. In the Georgics, however, the real world appears prominently and has a certain stability, though not to be trusted, and perhaps not at all as real as it seems; consequently the poetic conception and its expression are more clear, less dreamlike, though there remain (as we will see) visions of peace and order that prove too fragile in this real world to be ultimately satisfying or viable. The Aeneid, finally, is Virgil's Rome: as chaos and inexplicable violence had yielded at last to order and indeed to the rituals and formal ceremonies of the civil and religious past of the city, it was natural that Virgil and Horace would shape this experience through these public and therefore comprehensible expressions. Virgil could never forget blind violence, the irrational madness that is never alien to human nature and is a constant in the universe, but at least the world itself came finally to have patterns and designs of a tangible reality (intellectual and spiritual, historical and religious) against which furor could be comprehended.
We can see, then, that Virgil's own experience (the history of his time) made it inevitable that his first expression of this experience would be private, the construction of his own mind, for outwardly there was nothing but disorder and confusion. From 29 to 19 B.C., however, an order emerged in the external world which just a few years before had seemed beyond hope, a stability that must have been welcomed with intense relief even by those who had suffered losses they could never forget: Virgil's private constructions remained (they were never replaced) but began to appear in altered forms, clothed or masked on occasion so as to seem to be the public expressions of the Augustan peace. Virgil became more comprehensible — on the surface.
If we are to understand the middle years and the Georgics, we must understand especially the first private reflections of the poet. It was only intellectually and imaginatively that Virgil at first could give form and meaning to disorder and violence: thus, what is most Virgilian (and this is true still for the Aeneid) is what is private, reflective, and allusive. Understanding of his poetry can come only from reconstructing the private world he created His material at first was primarily poetic the Eclogues are made of poetry almost entirely. The Georgics (as the real world begins to offer comprehensible shapes and patterns), while no less a poetic structure and built of poetic material, is a poem of science and uses the intellectual structures of scientific literature; both these creations will be altered, finally, in the historical vision of the Aeneid, which thus remains, essentially, a poem (and a very private one at that), not a work of historical rationalizing.
My study of the Georgics is largely an attempt to reconstruct Virgil's private creations (or at least some of them to some extent) by finding and examining some (at least) of the pieces he used. These pieces are such things as ash trees, infatuation, violent storms, the shepherd's song, glory, or peace. The most obvious difficulty is that although these pieces exist in the world we share, our conception of even the most mundane of these can be (and probably is) vastly different from the Roman conception (that is, the common ground within the idea of "ash tree" or of "peace" shared by every Roman), which in turn will differ from that particular aspect of the conception that Virgil will want to suggest, perhaps paradoxically, in a particular instance: we must first see an ash tree as a Roman would have seen it, and then as Virgil conceived it for a particular purpose, where it might acquire its own special significance from an earlier poetic context, perhaps, or as part of an established literary topic, or as a recurring element in a private pattern being constructed by the poet himself.
We are of course foreigners in the Roman world, in language, culture, and thought, as every classicist is aware. We do not feel anything sinister or magical in an ash tree. Infatuation, for us, is the proper concern of psychiatrists. We know what causes violent storms, our hurricanes and tornadoes, and in the case of the former, at least, we know beforehand exactly when and where they will strike; and we have agencies, public and private, to pick up the pieces afterwards and pay insurance claims. Glory is a concept we know only by hearsay, a somewhat archaic notion that has been replaced by notoriety or celebrity. Peace, on the other hand, which Virgil regarded only as a deceptive possibility, we see as a reality, something that is our right. We must try to find out what Virgil's readers knew instinctively (though it is possible to do so only in a limited way), since it is with such pieces that Virgil creates, bending and transforming the shared and the general to his own purposes.
Virgil was a reflective poet, which explains both why he worked so slowly and why his three poems present such a coherent whole. His reflections are both private and literary, from the beginning: allusion made his inner world real and tangible. He reflected by setting pieces of reality side by side, by making a simple pattern of objects and ideas, then putting this pattern up against another; later, a different object may be substituted in the pattern, or others added, with an entirely new result, or several new ideas may upset a balance previously contrived. Virgil, like Horace, gives us his reflections by manipulating a succession of concrete images, which may be as tangible as an ash tree or may be an idea or concept such as peace or the Golden Age. Allusion helps here, especially when an image is literary, as when adaptation of a few lines from the Iliad can suggest Achilles and fire and war, or when a Theocritean tag may summon up sleep in a summer's noon. Allusion, too, can suggest, often by one word, a whole previously established pattern. We must be aware, though, that Virgil's process of reflecting does not allow any pattern to remain for long and that no pattern will be definitive.
All of this is to say simply what it is to be a poet, and what makes poetry different from geometry, psychology, history, or philosophy. "Language is by no means our only articulate product," Suzanne Langer wrote. Music is expressive, but it can make no statements, and the visual arts, while they can present images, cannot argue a case. Virgilian poetry (I am tempted to say "real poetry") is more like music and the visual arts than it is like history or philosophy, but since it uses words (not just sounds, shapes, and colors), it is often thought to be discursive or analytical, or to carry a logical argument forward to a conclusion, which then is assumed to be Virgil's meaning. But Virgil's meaning is not of this sort, any more than (to take a useful but trivial example) is Hogarth's. The Rake's Progress says a great deal to us with a range of expression (humor, sadness, pathos, disgust), but what it says cannot be reduced to any such statement as, "The degenerate life is bad." As Virgil reflects, he gives us patterns of images which, as they continually change, affect us in part emotionally, as does music, but ultimately alter our intellectual awareness and understanding of the world. There are, however, no answers, no messages that we can repeat at the end of our reading. Langer again: "An idea that contains too many minute yet closely related parts, too many relations within relations, cannot be 'projected' into discursive form; it is too subtle for speech."
We might remember, too, that it is the business of science to classify and define: order and meaning are established from chaos by separating one thing (or group of things) from another, by excluding. Definition establishes the set of characteristics shared by one group only. Ash trees are different from maples in certain ways; a word is defined to mean what no other word means; the concept of Justice, or the Good, is established by rejecting false concepts and excluding misleading similarities. Art, on the other hand, finds connections between apparent dissimilarities, by suddenly revealing patterns of associations in the chaos of appearance. Discursive thinking must attain clarity, whereas art can confuse what had seemed to be clear and can disturb our passive acceptance. Thus the poet never intends to tell us about Hamlet what the philosopher or psychologist (or most critics) want to know, and as well he can leave us with doubt and uncertainties that we ought not to attempt to resolve. Virgil gives us connections, not definitions, and reserves the right to find patterns whose clarity unsettles our preconceptions.
It seems necessary to begin with this simplified view of Virgil and his poetry as a non-discursive art because so many studies want to find the wrong sort of answer in his puzzle, to reduce what he has created to a bald generalization (and often to a bland inanity of the sort found in the popular moralizing of a Sunday magazine): "Civil war is bad; madness is destructive, as is anything that goes too far; the peace of rural self-sufficiency is the proper ideal for men." Virgil's meaning can hardly be in such messages. We should try to get the right pieces in the right places: the pictures that result will be the meaning the poet intended.
My goals in studying the Georgics are essentially two: first, to see as clearly as possible what things meant for Virgil and his contemporaries, and second, to see what things meant for Virgil in the evolving context of the poem, his own vision. Since these goals are frequently suggested to be impossible (with the consequent assumption that we shouldn't even try to read as a Roman read, or attempt to understand Virgil's mind and intentions), it is worth answering that we can do a great deal better than we have done previously. If we do not see any point or possibility in trying as best we can to comprehend a Roman's reaction to "ash tree" or "death," then why read a Latin poem in Latin — why not be content with a paraphrase, or even an outline?
These are, in one sense, the Virgihan elements I will be concerned with — the pieces used to make the poetic patterns, the elements of poetic thoughts.
* * *
My preoccupation with the Georgics has come more and more to focus on the question, "Why did Virgil write on farming?" We tend to take for granted that farming was a suitable, even natural, subject for a poem, for a variety of reasons: because it is after all a fact and one of the first facts we learn about Latin literature, and the familiar is always what we question the least (Nicander's poem on snakes, by contrast, is one of the last things we learn of Greek literature, and therefore the subject seems immediately odd); because Hesiod had written on farming; because we call it a didactic poem, and feel comfortable with that generic designation; because we find that even though plowing or grafting may not be of great interest, the poem is really a grand metaphor for life. Such reasons, however, dull our appreciation of just how unusual, or even strange, it was for Virgil to have decided on the subject, and turn us from asking exactly what it was that farming not simply allowed Virgil to say, but offered positively, as no other conceivable subject did.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Virgil's Elements by David O. Ross Jr.. Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- PREFACE, pg. ix
- CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
- CHAPTER TWO: BOOK I, pg. 32
- CHAPTER THREE: BOOK II, pg. 95
- CHAPTER FOUR: BOOK III, pg. 149
- CHAPTER FIVE: BOOK IV, pg. 188
- CHAPTER SIX: AN OVERVIEW, pg. 234
- BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES, pg. 243
- INDEX LOCORUM, pg. 249
- INDEX NOMINUM ET RERUM, pg. 253