Perspectives of Roman Poetry: A Classics Symposium 9780292772830

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Perspectives of Roman Poetry A Classics Symposium

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Symposia in the Arts and the Humanities NUMBER I

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Perspectives of Roman Poetry A Classics Symposium

Essays by GEORG LUCK W ILLIAM

S. A N D E R S O N

K E N N E T H J. R E C K F O R D ERICH SEGAL G. K A R L G A L I N S K Y

Edited and Prefaced by G. Karl Galinsky

Published for the College of Humanities and the College of Fine Arts of The University of Texas at Austin by the University of Texas Press, Austin and London

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Perspectives of Roman poetry. (Symposia in the arts and the humanities, no. 1) “Based on the formal proceedings of the symposium ‘Perspectives of Roman Poetry/ which was held at the University of Texas at Austin on February 14-16, 1972.” Includes bibliographical references. 1. Latin poetry—Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Luck, Georg, 1926II. Galinsky, Gotthard Karl, 1942ed. III. Texas. University at Austin. IV. Series. PA6047.P4 871'.009 74-5314 ISBN 0-292-76420-0 Copyright © 1974 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Composition by G&S Typesetters, Austin Printing by The University of Texas Printing Division, Austin Binding by Universal Bookbindery, Inc., San Antonio

Contents

P r e f a c e ....................................................................................... The Woman’s Role in Latín Love P o e tr y ................................15 GEORG LUCK

Autobiography and Art in H o r a c e ........................................33 W ILLIAM S. ANDERSON

Some Trees in Virgil and T o l k i e n ........................................57 KENNETH J. RECKFORD

The Business of Roman C o m e d y ........................................93 ERICH SEGAL

Ovid’s Metamorphosis of M y t h ................................................105 G. KARL GALINSKY

The Originality of Roman P o e t r y ........................................129 PANEL DISCUSSION

Notes on C o n trib u to rs................................................................153 I n d e x ....................................................................................... 155

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Preface

The essays and the panel discussion contained in this volume are based on the formal proceedings of the symposium “Perspectives of Roman Poetry,” which was held at the University of Texas at Austin on February 14-16, 1972. The symposium was not meant to be a specialists’ conclave on some technical subject that would be of in­ terest only to the classicists, but its aim was to appeal to the gen­ eral university audience and to students of literature in particular. The excellent attendance at the various lectures and the general re­ sponse to the program proved this expectation to be more than a vain hope. It is a pleasure to thank Dean Stanley N. Werbow of the College of Humanities for his interest and support, which made pos­ sible both the symposium and the publication of this volume. In accordance with the format of the lectures, the goal of these essays is to give the reader a good understanding of some essential aspects of a Roman poet’s work or even of a genre, such as elegy. Besides responding to the need for interpretive literary essays—a need that has contributed in no small part to the remarkable revival of the study of Roman literature in this country in the past decade— the essays also reflect the diversity of Roman poetry. All too often, its variety and vitality have been ignored and obscured. There are sev­ eral reasons for this. One is the lingering influence of the Romantic school of criticism, which denied to the Roman writers creative imagination and inde­ pendence and preferred to cast them as the imperfect imitators of their superior Greek “models.” The response that followed, if not causally, at least chronologically, was that Latin scholars during the last century, in an attempt to head off the growing role of the sci­

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ences in the curriculum, began to disentangle, with painstakingly scientific methodology, the “Roman” from the “Greek” elements in Roman poetry. This era has largely passed, but its mechanistic pro­ cedures and thinking are still very much with us, even if they have taken on new guises. The tendency is compounded by the postulate that a scholar should approach a given subject in terms of establish­ ing a thesis, and by the confusion of his cunning and success at such endeavor with critical acumen and literary insight. On the other hand, the contemporary interpreter of Roman poetry can no longer uncritically allow himself to be awed by its monolithic majesty or to adopt the attitude of worshipful respect that was generally accorded to the greatest Latin writers during the Augustan and classicistic periods of the vernacular literatures and that slowly fossilized these writers in the long course of their existence as school authors. Regrettable as the absence of classical circles from the forefront of literary sensibility may have been in this century, it has, paradoxi­ cally, had two undeservedly beneficial results. One is that, even though Roman poetry has been studied for a long time, many basic questions remain to be asked and many central topics still invite ex­ ploration, without the need of a dreary recapitulation of what has al­ ready been said, and without the necessity of the umpteenth reassess­ ment of much-trodden ground. Even in the scholarship and criticism of a classic like the Aeneid a salutary trend has unmistakably devel­ oped in recent years that leads away from peripheral concerns and brings us to grips with the fundamental questions to which our col­ leagues in other literatures and our own students have demanded answers with increasing, and just, vehemence. This trend is only marginally related to the kind of demonstrative relevance that is ex­ pected from humanistic disciplines in large or troubled (or both) universities. Rather, it reflects the increasing awareness that a schol­ ar, if he is concerned with texts that have become a part of world literature, should not only be competent in a technical sense, but also at least venture to find the secret of their appeal. In short, one of the refreshing aspects of the current situation of Latin literary scholar­ ship is that, aside from the intrinsic need to reinterpret a classic in any given age and society, much important stuff is still not cut and dried, and many vital aspects of the Roman poets’ achievement still need to be scrutinized.

Preface

11

It has also been beneficial to this kind of inquiry that there exist no established schools or hermeneutics of criticism for Latin litera­ ture. True enough, certain scholars favor, for instance, imagistic, psy­ choanalytical, or historical approaches. ( It is symptomatic of the posi­ tion of this criticism that the rather literal psychoanalytical approach, decades after being jettisoned by serious psychologists, now has been discovered by classicists and been proclaimed the hallmark of the avant-garde.) But the general situation, perhaps for the first time ever, is one of experimentation and diversity. From this, Latin poetry stands to benefit more than from overarching theories of criticism. For the tension between tradition and originality, the diversity, and, hopefully, the vitality that characterize the works of the best Roman poets now exist in the criticism of Roman poetry. The reader will find more detailed views on the general nature of Roman poetry and its criticism in the panel discussion. What is encouraging in this dis­ cussion and in the various essays is the participants’ refusal to accept ready-made labels or facile stereotypes, which would only inhibit, and in the past have inhibited, fresh inquiry into a diverse subject. In order to preserve this spirit, we decided to name this inquiry “Per­ spectives of Roman Poetry” rather than adopt a more definitive title, such as “The Nature of Roman Poetry.” Among these perspectives, two emerge that are common to more than one author and that have been much neglected by the scholars and critics of Roman poetry. One is the significance of some of these Roman poets within the history of ideas. This aspect is not a con­ struct of what we might call the conceptual fallacy in the interpreta­ tion of poetry, for it exists quite validly and does not impinge on or detract from the literary artistry of the poets. Professor Luck re­ minds us of it when he concludes his discussion by pointing out that “it took society more than a millennium to adopt the ideas presented by the Roman Stoics and lived, in their own way, by the Roman ele­ giac poets.” Similarly, the idea of the heroism of endurance, a hero­ ism quite unlike the Romantic hero ideal of the defiant Prometheus, is more than the idiosyncratic fiction of one poet, as Professor Reckford demonstrates in his essay. Its formulation by Vergil may in many ways have been the response to his specific historical experi­ ence, but it is not limited to Augustan Rome. Ovid, finally, appears at a crucial juncture in the development of Graeco-Roman myth—a

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heritage that has been the inspiration for much of Western literature —and transforms it by re-evoking one of its essential components, that of play. This is related to a second major, and much neglected, perspective of Roman poetry. The general, well-known premise of the standard interpretations of Roman literature is that Roman authors accepted the force of tradition and of genres that, with the possible exception of satire, the Greeks had well established. Seen in that light, the Ro­ man achievement can never quite escape the stigma of being deriva­ tive. But there is another way of looking at the situation in which the Roman writers found themselves. Since they found existing genres and conventions, they could play with them and thus assert their in­ dependence. Instead of being overawed or inhibited by the tradi­ tion and its norms, these writers manipulated them freely. Plautus does not write Greek comedy in Rome, but, as Professor Segal put it in his lecture, the characters in his comedies “Greek it up.” Plautus has them play the role of Greeks, and these Greeks are subject to his creative manipulation. The interplay—and perhaps the accent should be put on the last syllable—between art and autobiography in Hor­ ace’s poetry is the subject of Professor Anderson’s essay. It is again evident that the poet does not abide by fixed norms but changes and ultimately reverses the relationship between the artistic and the au­ tobiographical elements of his oeuvre as he sees fit during the var­ ious stages of his poetic career. The self-assured attitude with which these Roman poets and others play with literary conventions is a sign of true maturity and at the same time, in the words of Professor An­ derson, “a most profound application of the Greek word poiesis.” Finally, the essays of Professors Segal and Reckford, in particular, are a useful reminder that the perspectives of Roman poetry do not end with the fall of the Roman Empire. These essays illustrate the organic connection that exists between ancient and modem litera­ tures. It is a connection that cannot be understood merely in terms of “influences” of the one on the other, which would have been the “classic line” of scholarly explanation until recently, but in terms of the unity of Western literature. A responsible and receptive aware­ ness of this basic fact is, to borrow Mr. Segal’s key metaphor, anoth­ er aspect of the business of today’s classicists.

Perspectives of Roman Poetry A Classics Symposium

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The Woman’s Role in Latin Love Poetry

GEORG LUCK

I have chosen this topic because I believe that the wom­ an s role in the Roman society of the first century B.C. explains to a large extent the unique character of the love poetry of that period, from Catullus to Ovid. One of the striking facts about this period is that we know very little about the private life of the Romans in the Augustan Age. Thanks to the Oxyrhynchus papyri we are better in­ formed about the daily life of Egyptian farmers of the late Hellen­ istic period.1 Moreover, we are dealing with poetic texts, which means that we should not take everything too seriously. So often, readers ask whether the poet is sincere, whether he really means what he says, whether he is talking of a true experience. A French statesman—I think it was Aristide Briand—was asked by a friend at the close of an impassioned oration: "Were you really sincere in what you said?” Briand replied: “How should I know?” My answer is the 1 On the social position of women in Hellenistic Egypt cf. Claire Preaux, Rec. Soc. Bodin 11, no. 1 (1959): 127-175.

Georg Luck

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same. How can we know? So much is simply literature or rhetoric or topos or poetic convention. Two recent books have not avoided the pitfalls that I should like to caution against. There is J. P. V. D. Balsdon’s Roman Women and Sara Lilja’s monograph, The Roman Elegists9 Attitude to Women 2 I reviewed Lilja’s book for Gnomon,3 and it was interesting to see how a woman approached the topic. In her sensible book Lilja quotes well over a thousand passages and comments on many of them. Yet in the end no clear picture of these writers’ attitudes to­ ward women seems to emerge—and no wonder. Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid work within the same tradition, and one can de­ vise various headings under which two or even three of them come together. But although they have much in common, these writers are totally different as individuals. Moreover, their beliefs and attitudes change in the course of the years. The Propertius who writes the elegies of Book IV is no longer the Propertius who wrote the Monobiblos, and his attitude toward women is no longer the same. Ovid has, perhaps, a more stereotyped image of woman, but that does not make his testimony more valuable. These may be truisms, and yet one should keep them in mind when one speaks of the Latin poets and their women. It is difficult to say how much of the feeling expressed in this po­ etry we should discount. For example, when Propertius says, “I suf­ fer,” he may be utterly miserable; on the other hand, he may be striking a tragic pose. We must consider not only the inevitable rhet­ oric, but also the moods that come and go, and of course, the abun­ dance of irony, which is difficult to pin down and which opens up new questions, as we shall see. It is risky to commit poets to certain points of view or attitudes, because we are often not sure about where to draw the line between true experience and literary conven­ tion, between feeling and form. One of G. E. Lessing’s epigrams il­ luminates in a flash the difference between Voltaire and Shakespeare: Voltaire says: “I cry!”

But Shakespeare cries. How often does Ovid say “I cry” without expecting to be taken seri2J. P. V. D. Baisdon, Roman Women (London: Bodley Head, 1962); Sara Lilja, The Roman Elegists’ Attitude to Women ( Helsinki, 1965). 3 Georg Luck, Gnomon 38 (1966): 518-519.

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17

ously? As a famous author he is proud of the number of his con­ quests, but later, in exile, he implies that he has never led a very exciting life ( Trist. 2.354): "vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea” [My life is chaste, only my Muse is naughty]. This means that Ovid could identify himself with the hero of the Amoves without betraying any secrets, but that there never was a total identity. The poet could disassociate himself from his hero at any moment. Hence, the ques­ tion of sincerity—so fashionable today—is unanswerable. Lilja’s book demonstrates very clearly that scholars are unable to agree who loves his mistress most deeply. Hermann Frankel thought Ovid the most sincere lover, but Karl Buchner apparently could not possibly see Ovid in this role.4 I wonder whether this kind of problem is real­ ly legitimate. How much do we know? How much evidence do we have? There is a certain tenderness in Tibullus that, as Sellar point­ ed out long ago,5 is lacking in Propertius and Ovid, but how can we be sure that Tibullus loved Nemesis more passionately than he loved Delia, as Lilja claims?6 Let me illustrate the pitfalls that are involved in this type of anal­ ysis with an example from postclassical literature. A scholar of the nineteenth century, Heinrich Diintzer, wrote commentaries on Goethe’s poems, using many Greek and Latin quotations and frequent references to Goethe’s autobiographical notes. As everyone knows, Goethe loved many ladies, and his recollections in later years were not always as clear as a commentator might wish. Two of these la­ dies inspired some of his greatest lyric poems, and years later Goethe wrote down something like this: "Looking back at this period of my life I really believe that I loved Lily more than Friederike”; where­ upon Diintzer, his commentator, immediately lifts his forefinger and exclaims "Here Goethe is wrong! Hier irrt Goethe. . . . He actu­ ally loved Friederike more than Lily!” This is an extreme example (and I cannot vouch for its authenticity in every detail), but it may serve as a warning to classical scholars who have no autobiographi­ cal records to confuse them. 4 Hermann Frankel, Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (Los Angeles: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1956), p. 58; K. Biichner, Die lateinische Literatur und Sprache in der Forschung seit 1937 (Bern: A. Francke, 1951), p. 49. 5 W. Y. Sellar, Horace and the Elegiac Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), p. 237.

6 Lilja, The Roman Elegists’ Attitude to Women, p. 80.

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Georg Luck

Balsdon s book on Roman women covers a much longer period than the one we are interested in; it begins with the rape of the Sabine women and goes on to the end of antiquity. It is based on texts and documents of all kinds, as well as the testimony of the poets. It seems, however, that Balsdon and others have misunder­ stood certain crucial passages in Catullus and Propertius. For ex­ ample, he writes: “There were prostitutes; there were, in the late Re­ public and afterwards, expensive kept women, the concubine ( concabina ); and there was the casta puella, the good wife, the materfamilias supervising the education of her sons and, together with her daughters, busy in making her husband’s household clothes. The sen­ sational women of the late Republic were women who tired of being castae puellrn and kicked over the traces. They became courtesans, sometimes notorious courtesans.”7 The types of women that Balsdon distinguishes in his reading of Catullus and Propertius sound very much like clichés, at least in the passage I have just quoted. Clichés always obscure the vision. Is it not the ability to observe and distinguish the characteristic features of a period that makes a good historian? I wonder whether this may be a question of semantics rather than a historical phenomenon. In a remarkable book, first published in Germany in 1913 and recently translated into English, Werner Sombart, one of the great econo­ mists of his time, studied the relationship between capitalism and what we would now call the “dolce vita” in Western civilization. This extremely well documented study offers much more than its topic seems to promise. It deals, among other things, with the con­ cept of love in the Italian Renaissance and in eighteenth-century France. These are periods for which we have a wealth of material, infinitely more than for the late Roman Republic, and we can learn something from certain analogies. Sombart writes: . . . as illicit love becomes more and more a goal in itself, a new class of women grows between the Femme honnête and the Putain. We find a wide range of names for this class in the Romance languages, but German —and probably English too—lacks a term, unless you want to accept as such the vague term “Buhlerin” [i.e., mistress], which means that the phe­ nomenon was either limited to Latin countries or imported from there: cortegiana, courtesan, concubine, maîtresse, grande amoureuse, grande cocotte, femme entretenue, etc. These ladies take love—which had become 7 Balsdon, Roman Women, p. 15.

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one of the liberal arts—out of the sphere of dilettantism and make it the object of professional care .. .8 When we look at third-century Athens or first-century Rome, we realize how limited our vocabulary—and, I suppose, our experience —is. Roman society was different from Greek society, and a Roman marriage was different from an Athenian one. Nevertheless, in order to understand illicit love at a certain level, love as a goal in itself, the love affair as a work of art, we must consider the Greek influ­ ence. For generations young Romans had been sent to Athens for their higher education, which almost certainly included more than the study of philosophy and rhetoric. Cicero, who prides himself on his virtuous behavior, must have been an exception, but his son probably behaved more like the typical Roman student. If their families could not afford Athens, these young Romans at least went to Syracuse or Naples, all Greek cities (Petron. Sat. 5, w . 9ff). As far as we know, Menander gives us a stylized but realistic pic­ ture of social life in a Greek city of the postclassical period. The young men and women we meet in his plays are not very different from those Cicero’s son would have met. For Ovid and his public, Menander is practically required reading. This is why I believe we should look to New Comedy for more information about the kind of social life that the elegists show us in a highly polished but rather narrow mirror. For our purpose Rome is a Hellenistic city, and such poets as Catullus and Propertius have more in common with Calli­ machus and Euphorion than with Coriolanus or Cato Censorius. We have a catalogue of theater masks or types with which the poets of the New Comedy worked. Many of the characters in this list have been at least tentatively identified.9 There are seventeen dif­ ferent types of women, most of them apparently belonging to that class which spreads, according to Sombart, between the materfamilias and the meretrix. It was clearly this class of women—and not the respectable housewife and mother—that fascinated Greek men and kept their imaginations working. A strong emotional appeal of 8 Werner Sombart, Luxus und Kapitalismus (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1913), pp. 33-34. English translation by W. R. Dittmar (Ann Ar­ bor: University of Michigan Press, 1967). The translation of the passage quoted in the text is my own. 9 Julius Pollux, Onomasticon IV, 143ff. Bekker; cf. Hedwig Kenner, Das Theater und der Realismus in der griechischen Kunst (Vienna: Sexl, 1955).

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Georg Luck

this type always translates itself into language: think of the wealth of expressions that English and German offer for "getting drunk.” We find in that list of masks the very young courtesan who has just started her career and is called the ‘little touch,” apparently because of her hairdo. There is the "perfect hetaera,” smart and arrogant; the "golden hetaera,” who grew quite wealthy in her profes­ sion; and the grey-haired "courtesan emerita,” who is semirespect­ able and acts mostly as adviser and confidante to her younger col­ leagues. Of course no play of Menander s could possibly present all these types: the list is clearly a compilation from many plays, written and produced over a long period of time. It shows the loving care that the Greeks—that is, the Athenians, one of the most highly edu­ cated and sophisticated people the world has ever seen—lavished on a class of women dealing in professional love. I suppose one would find an equal wealth of expressions in Parisian argot. English and German are poor in comparison. The social life in Rome looks simple only because we have so little evidence. It is dangerous to apply ready-made labels to an infinitely complex social phenomenon. Descriptions based on a careful reading of the text are more helpful. I am getting tired of seeing the question of whether or not Propertius’s Cynthia was a prostitute debated over and over again by serious-minded classical scholars. She is certainly not the typical materfamilias in Balsdon’s classification. On the other hand, she is, for Propertius, in an entirely different class from the puellae leves or viles, or scorta. At this point I should like to clear up another misunderstanding. In the first poem of his first book Propertius says that Cynthia, by re­ jecting his love, has forced him to reject castas puellas. Much has been written on the meaning of castae puellae; the most recent con­ tribution that I have seen is an article by Professor J. P. Sullivan,10 but he comes to no clear answer. Balsdon and others have assumed that casta puella is the kind of woman one would want to be his wife, the mother of his children. This is not true. It may come as a surprise, but there cannot be the slightest doubt that, to Propertius, Cynthia herself is casta puella . Obviously, casta has a rather relative meaning in Roman society. But the fact is that neither Propertius nor Cynthia want to get married (I shall discuss 2.7 in a moment); 10 J. P. Sullivan, “Castas odisse puellas,” Wiener Studien 74 (1961): 96-112.

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both find the kind of love affair that Propertius describes much more satisfying. The affair therefore becomes a kind of unofficial marriage in which the partners have agreed to observe certain standards of behavior. Propertius often refers to the foedus, the unofficial contract between him and Cynthia that takes the place of the normal legally binding contract between man and wife. One of the terms of this contract seems to be that Cynthia may have an occasional adventure with an­ other man as long as Propertius remains her official lover. In other words, he wants her to be reasonably, not absolutely, faithful, and he is willing to consider her casta as long as she conforms to this clause. Although evidence is clear on this point, it has never been properly understood, because scholars tend to take such terms as cas­ ta , pudica , verecunda at face value (cf. Prop. 1.1.5; 2.1.49f.; 3.12.21f.). Propertius urges Cynthia to think of her reputation ( parcere famae, 1.16.11). She, herself, is at times critical of unfaithful women and unable to admire Homer’s Iliad because she disapproves of Helen s adultery. She calls women who have more than one lover leves puellae (2.1.49f.). Similarly, Propertius does not want to be put in the same class as his friend Gallus, whom he describes as the typical seducer and man-about-town, always loving and leaving them (1.13). To his mind, such affairs are vulgares amores, and Gal­ lus, who likes to boast of the number of his conquests, is "faithless,” perfidus. It all sounds very nice and old-fashioned and conventional, and, I am sure, in a way it was meant to be so. But of course neither Cynthia nor Propertius conform to the standards they proclaim. Cynthia has several affairs with other men (2.5.1ff.). And Cynthia’s ghost (4.7) accuses Propertius of having betrayed her. To put it differently, the fact that Cynthia has an affair with Pro­ pertius does not, in his eyes, harm her reputation. She is, as far as he is concerned, casta and pudica . He even allows her an occasional escapade. Only when she takes on too many lovers does he object. He knows that she deceives him now and then (2.32), and suspect­ ing an amor furtivus ( ibid.v. 17), he warns her (2.32.21-22): sed de me minus est: famae iactura pudicae tanta tibi miserae, quanta meretur, erit. [But it matters less, as far as I am concerned. The loss of your good reputation will be just as bad for you, poor girl, as it should be.]

Georg Luck

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He seems to be as worried about her reputation as a husband or brother. And yet he knows that it would be absurd to ask a Roman lady of the Augustan Age to behave as though she lived under Rom­ ulus. If Roman women are unfaithful, it is partly because of the cor­ rupting influence of the age (3.13.23f.). Although he is not so un­ reasonable as to demand absolute faith and devotion (2.23.29f.), he insists on a certain minimum of loyalty, and he is pleased when she rejects, for instance, the advances of his friend Lynceus (2.34.I lf.) .11 What we have established in Propertius’s case will help us under­ stand a puzzling passage in Catullus. In poem 68.95f., when he looks back at his first secret meeting with Lesbia in the house of a friend, Catullus promises that he will always love her, even though she may deceive him now and then with other men (68.135-137): quae tametsi uno non est contenta Catullo, rara verecundae furta feremus erae, ne nimium simus stultorum more molesti. [And even if she is not satisfied with Catullus alone, I shall bear the occasional infidelities of my chaste mistress, lest—like a fool—I really annoy her.] Here the adjective verecunda applied to Lesbia has upset scholars, just as casta, pudica did in Propertius, and Professor Karl Büchner has changed verecundae to verecunde, an adverb that would have to be taken with feremusP Now I would look at any textual emenda­ tion of Professor Büchner with suspicion, but this one, laboriously justified by the author in a long article, is particularly reprehensible 11 As I prepared this talk, I read the volume of Aldous Huxley’s letters just published (edited by Grover Smith, New York: Harper and Row, 1969). In a letter of November 21, 1957, Huxley tells a friend that when he wrote The Genius and the Goddess he was thinking of D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, both of whom he knew well. What he remembers about their relation­ ship illustrates well the point I want to make. “With a whole heart she [the Katy of the play] loves and admires her genius and with a whole heart she quarrels with him. . . . Frieda and Lawrence had, undoubtedly, a profound and passionate love-life. But this did not prevent Frieda from having, every now and then, affairs with Prussian cavalry officers and Italian peasants, whom she loved for a season without in any way detracting from her love for Lawrence or from her intense devotion to his genius. Lawrence, for his part, was aware of these erotic excursions, got angry about them sometimes, but never made the least effort to break away from her” ( p . 831). 12K. Büchner, Humanitas Romana (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1957), Ch. 5.

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because it destroys evidence—one of the worst philological sins. From Professor Büchner’s point of view, verecundae is not a very suitable epithet for Lesbia, but for Catullus it obviously was, for he says, in effect, that in his eyes she will always be verecunda (or casta or púdica ) as long as she is moderately faithful to him, does not have too many affairs with other men, or is at least discreet about them. No change is needed in the text. I think it has become clear that Catullus and Propertius interpret the Roman code of ethics they have inherited in a personal and very liberal manner. Instead of throwing these values overboard, they re­ evaluate them, and even though they may not consider a convention­ al marriage an ideal solution for themselves, they never reject or ridicule marriage as an institution. Propertius may have married a thoroughly acceptable lady after he broke with Cynthia and left a son;13 Ovid was married three times and had a daughter and at least one grandchild. These poets know what marriage means to a girl. Catulluss c. 51 Ille mi par esse deo videtur is a translation or adaptation from Sap­ pho’s Greek, and his wedding poems 61 and 62 (especially 62) are probably influenced by Greek texts; at the same time they seem to express the conventional feelings of a typical Roman family. His ad­ vice to the young bride (61.144ff.) is: nupta, tu quoque quae tuus uir petet, caue ne neges, ni petitum aliunde eat. [Please do not deny your husband’s wish, lest he go elsewhere •

•

.1

This sounds like a piece of advice a Roman mother might give her daughter on her wedding day. In another wedding song (62), Ca­ tullus expresses the upper-middle-class morality of Verona when he says that a girl should not surrender her maidenhood before mar­ riage because it is something very precious that belongs only partly to her. One-third belongs to her father, one-third to her mother

(62.62-65): 13 In 3.20 Propertius clearly begins a new affair. The lady whom he describes in enthusiastic terms is definitely not Cynthia but almost certainly the lady for whom he left her (cf. 4.7) and quite probably the lady he eventually married. The younger Pliny ( Epist. 9.22.1) speaks of one Passennus Paullus as a de­ scendant of the poet.

Georg Luck

24 virginitas non tota tua est, ex parte parentum est: tertia pars patris est, pars est data tertia matri, tertia sola tua est: noli pugnare duobus, qui genero sua iura simul cum dote dederunt.

[Your maidenhood is not all yours; it is partly your parents’. Onethird is your fathers, one-third your mother’s; only a third is yours. Don’t fight against the two; they have surrendered their rights along with the dowry to their son-in-law.]

On her wedding night the bride must be prepared to surrender her virginity to the bridegroom because her parents, when they executed the marriage contract, legally handed her over to him (59ff.). This means, among other things, that it would be in poor taste for the bride to put up a fight, and Catullus is apparently not only thinking of a mock fight ( cf. 66.13ff.); she might, after all, take such a violent dislike to the man that she would rather run back to her parents’ house, an action that would create scandal in a small town like Ve­ rona. No doubt this happened occasionally, but, given the strong family sense of the Romans, I cannot believe that the bride would have been entirely unprotected. Catullus’s wedding songs are not typical of his poetry, and this may be one of the reasons why they are so rarely discussed. They were clearly written for special occasions and meant to express the feelings of the families concerned rather than those of the poet. I wonder whether Catullus did not borrow a good deal from Sap­ pho when he wrote c. 62. In this poem, Catullus celebrates marriage as the fulfillment of a woman’s life. He chooses a striking image. The vine that lacks the support of a tree never produces sweet grapes, but left untended it bends and shrinks. Thus, he implies (but the exact correspondence is missing in the Latin text) that an un­ married daughter is a burden to her father (62.49-58): ut uidua in nudo uitis quae nascitur aruo, numquam se extollit, numquam mitem educat uuam, sed tenerum prono deflectens pondere corpus iam iam contingit summum radice flagellum; hanc nulli agricolae, nulli coluere iuuenci: at si forte eadem est ulmo coniuncta marito, multi illam agricolae, multi coluere iuuenci: sic uirgo dum intacta manet, dum inculta senescit;

50

55

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cum par conubium maturo tempore adepta est, cara uiro magis et minus est inuisa parenti. i[As a lonely vine growing on a bare field, never rising high, never bearing sweet grapes, but heavily bending down her ten­ der body and almost touching her roots with her topmost twig: no farmers, no youngsters pay any attention to her. But when she is married to an elm, many farmers, many youngsters pay attention to her. Thus, a girl who remains untouched, who grows old neglected . . . , but when she has found the right man at the right time, he loves her the more, and her father loves her no less.]

There must be an error in the textual transmission. Either a line has been dropped after v. 56, or v. 56 should be transposed after v. 53. The homoeoteleuton of coluere iuuenci might explain this error. Some other lines are missing in this poem, for example, after 32 ( as Avantius saw), and after 58 (where Muretus added the refrain), but I think the transposition of v. 56 after v. 53 will solve our prob­ lem; sic clearly refers to 49-53, not to 54-55. Catullus is not the least bit cynical about a conventional marriage. Ariadne’s lament in 64.132ff. is the lament of a girl who was prom­ ised marriage, conubia laeta ,. . . optatos hymenaeos (141) and then was jilted. But her love is so strong that, if Theseus’s father should object to their getting married, she would follow him to Athens as his slave ( 158ff.). The charming picture of married love in 328ff. ( cf. 372ff.) also confirms Catullus’s genuine and perhaps a little wistful understanding of marriage. The institution, the ritual, the traditional forms of a Roman mar­ riage greatly stimulated the imagination of the elegiac poets.14 Ca­ tullus compares his first meeting with Lesbia to the wedding of Laodamia and Protesilaus. To him it has the same emotional content, al­ though he knows, of course, that the analogy is imperfect because he is only allowed to enjoy rarely and secretly what belongs to an­ other man ( 68.73ff., 143ff.). In Augustan Rome the love affairs can take the place of a conven­ tional marriage. Neither Cynthia nor Propertius wish to get married; this is made clear in 2.7. Marriage as an institution might kill their love (7f.), and they do not want to have children. Both are relieved 14 Gordon Williams, “Some Aspects of Roman Marriage Ceremonies and Ideals,” Journal of Roman Studies 48 (1958): 16-29.

Georg Luck

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when Augustus, at least temporarily, withdraws one of the laws that would have made their marriage a kind of civic duty. This is a curi­ ous poem, and as I reread it, I realized for the first time that it can­ not be properly understood unless the last couplet of the preceding elegy 2.6 (which does not belong there at all) is added to it. In other words, it is not necessary (as suggested by Jachmann) to de­ lete the couplet or transpose it elsewhere: it is actually the begin­ ning of 2.7: Nos uxor numquam, numquam diducet arnica: semper arnica mihi, semper et uxor eris (2.6.43-44). Gauisa es certe sublatam, Cynthia, legem, qua quondam edicta flemus uterque diu, ni nos diuideret, quamuis diducere amantis non queat inuitos Iuppiter ipse duos. [No wife, no mistress will ever separate us two: you will always be my mistress, and you will always be my wife. You were cer­ tainly glad, Cynthia, when the law was repealed that made us cry for a long time when it was first proclaimed, lest it should di­ vide us; although even Jupiter could not divide two lovers against their will.] We have found a home for a stray couplet and given 2.7 a good beginning. The repetition of d iducet . . . diducere as well as arnica . . . amantis seems to show that these lines belong together. The direct address of eris at the end of the couplet confirms the change from est to es at the traditional beginning of 2.7, which was sug­ gested by Koppiers and Schrader and is accepted by all modern editors. The textual history of poets from Propertius and Ovid to Calpumius Siculus and Corippus shows how often poems or books were incorrectly divided by ignorant scribes. In the case of Pro­ pertius this creates a very confusing situation, especially in Book II. Propertius says, in fact, that Cynthia will always be his wife as well as his mistress, and that no wife, no mistress, will ever come between them. Theirs is a marriage in all but name. The last hexameter of this poem, “tu mihi sola places: placeam tibi, Cynthia, solus” [I like only you; Cynthia, may you like only me], may be a metrical version of the vows spoken at a Roman marriage ceremony. A similar formula concludes 2.21: nos quocumque loco, nos omni tempore tecum sive aegra pariter sive valente sumus,

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[I am with you everywhere and always, in sickness and in health],

and represents almost certainly another allusion to the Roman mar­ riage ritual, which has been kept alive, I am inclined to think, to the present day by the liturgical texts of the Church. In an article published in 1952, Erich Burck has observed that the Roman elegiac poets borrow many words from the language of con­ ventional ethics,15 including, as I have just pointed out, the sacred pledge, which ideally one makes only once in his life. When one con­ siders himself bound by a foedus aeternum, when one swears a sol­ emn oath and touches the domestic altar in confirmation of this (Prop. 3.20.25 tactas in foedera . . . aras, where the “deteriores” have the right text), then the gods are witnesses, even if this is not, strictly speaking, a marriage. This game of make-believe does not impose anything on the woman; in fact, the agreement may be her alternative to a boring and more restrictive conventional marriage. As long as this arrangement works, both man and woman can enjoy the sweet appeal of words like amor, fides, and foedus aeternum . Everything is relative. Since marriage had lost its meaning, the love affair could take its place. This convention seems to demand that the woman play the lead­ ing role, a role that was not normally granted to the wife and mother in a traditional Roman household. Of course, there have always been strong women, but Roman law and custom consistently favored the man s authority. By ignoring custom and laws, the elegiac poets cre­ ate a new world in which the woman is the domina in every sense. She was mistress, wife, and mother, all in one. For Catullus, the ideal mistress is not only beautiful, accomplished, passionate, and elegant but also strong-willed and domineering. For many years Propertius thinks of marriage as an admirable in­ stitution—for others. He advises his friend Tullus to marry a suitable girl and settle down in Italy (3.22.39-42): haec [sc. Roma] tibi, Tulle, parens, haec est pulcherrima sedes, hie tibi pro digna gente petendus honos, hie tibi ad eloquium cives, hie ampla nepotum spes et venturae coniugis aptus amor.

15 Erich Burck, “Römische Wesenszüge in der augusteischen Liebeselegie,” Hermes 80 (1952): 163-200.

28

Georg Luck [Rome is your mother, Tullus, and the best place to live; here you must gain honors that your family deserves; here you have fellow citizens who will admire your eloquence; here you can hope to have many grandchildren; and here you will surely find a suitable wife who will love you.]

In his later years Propertius pays elaborate homage to three ex­ emplary Roman wives: Aelia Galla (3.12), Arethusa (4.3), and Cor­ nelia, the wife of L. Aemilius Paullus Lepidus (4.11). These ladies are matronae of the finest kind. Galla and Arethusa are soldiers* wives, full of anxiety for their husbands, who seem to be stationed in or near Parthia. Arethusa worries whether her husband is as faith­ ful to her as she is to him. She insists that marriage has given her certain rights, too, and that the love between man and wife is deeper than any other love: Haecne marita fides et pactae turn mihi (pactae iam P Vo., parce avia N, em. Shillito) noctes, cum rudis urgenti bracchia victa dedi (4.3.11-12) omnis amor magnus, sed aperto in coniuge maior: hanc Venus, ut vivat, ventilât ipse facem. (4.3.49^50) [Are these our marriage vows? Are these the nights that you promised me, when I—inexperienced as I was—surrendered to your desire? . . . Love is always strong, but especially strong, when husband and wife are together; Venus herself fans this flame to keep it alive.] It has become fashionable to say that Propertius wrote most of Book IV with tongue in cheek. I admit that 4.1 is full of self-irony, and of course 4.8 is a humorous poem. Even some of the Roman ele­ gies, like 4.9, have humorous undertones. But I draw the line at the Cornelia elegy (4.11). Cornelias close connections with Augustus alone would seem to exclude any possibility of irony or sarcasm be­ tween the lines. As a true Roman matrona, Cornelia is proud to have been married to one man only, “In lapide hoc uni nupta fuisse legar (3 6 )” [Let it be recorded on this stone that I was married only once], and she tells her daughter to follow her example (68), “fac teneas unum nos imitata virum” [Follow my example and stay mar­ ried to one man alone]. Before the judges of the underworld, Cornelia swears that she has been pudica (41ff.) and that her husband, during

The Womans Role in Latin Love Poetry

29

his term of office as censor, never had to close both eyes to the of­ fenses of other ladies because everyone knew that his own wife had committed the very offenses a censor had to punish. Propertius pro­ claims his belief in the innate, inherited nobility of character: There are certain things that true aristocrats do not do (47), “mi natura dedit leges a sanguine ductas” [Nature gave me laws derived from my nobility]. Propertius is certainly not ironic when he says that a mother s love for her children transcends her death (73f.), “nunc tibi commendo communia pignora natos: haec cura et cineri spirat inusta meo.” [Now I entrust to you the children, our mutual pledge; my love for them is burnt into my ashes and breathes on.]

Using a very striking image, Propertius affirms that a mothers love is more intense than the fire that consumes her bones and that love endures, continuing to breathe in her ashes. We have talked about the matrona and about the domina in the Latin elegy. Let us now consider very briefly the role of the meretrix. In two elegies whose structure and mutual relationship are dis­ puted,16 2.23 and 24a, Propertius praises the advantages of the sim­ ple relationship with a meretrix over the endless complications of a love affair with a married lady. The thought that he indulges in the shabby pleasures of lower-class Romans pains Propertius, but he is tired of having to bribe the servants of the domina to be told where he can find her, of having to hide in a slaves quarters until the air is clear, and then, when he is finally alone with her, of being told: “Hurry, quick, get up, you fool; my husband comes back from the country today!” (2.23.19f.) The girls from the Middle East, who walk up and down the Via Sacra, in dusty shoes and provocative dress, are inexpensive and always available. In these poems Propertius seems to deal with one of the favorite themes of the Stoic/Cynic dia­ tribe, transforming it into the elegiac style. Again, the love affair can take the place of these casual encoun­ ters. Ovid’s Corinna lives with another man who may be her husband or lover (he speaks, however, of thalami pudici, Am. 1.8.19; cf. Prop. 2.23.22 nolim furta pudica tori). He, too, distinguishes Corin16 Cf. G. Luck, Gnomon 43 ( 1971 ) : 513-516.

Georg Luck

30

na from the meretrices whom we have just met ( Amores 1.10.2124): stat meretrix certo cuivis mercabilis aere et miseras iusso corpora quaerit opes; devovet imperium tamen haec lenonis avari et, quod vos facitis sponte, coacta facit. [The prostitute offers herself at a fixed price to everyone and earns a wretched living by selling her body. But even she curses her greedy pimp and does under compulsion what you do of your own free will.] The fact that women like Corinna enjoy sex ( le phisir physique qui contente Tame pleinement, according to Anna de Noailles), while to a prostitute it is merely a matter of routine, makes a difference to Ovid. For this reason, Corinna should not take gifts or money from her lovers, or at least she should take them only from her rich lovers, not from the poet. This seems to be the permanent complaint of well-educated young men from good families with little pocket money. I think it has become clear that the elegiac poets are most strong­ ly attracted to the ladies of the demi-monde. The longing for the girl one would like to marry, as we know it from English and Ger­ man romantic poetry, is almost totally unknown to the poets of the Augustan Age. Tibullus is, perhaps, an exception. As Sellar has ob­ served long ago, he may be called the most romantic, the most senti­ mental of the elegiac poets, and his dream of a simple life in the country with the girl he loves comes, perhaps, close to the idea of a marriage based on mutual love and respect, and yet, between the lines, we are allowed to read that this dream can never come true, because he does not really want it to come true. The fact remains that sophisticated women like Lesbia and Cyn­ thia were not products of the poets’ imaginations. They were real, and they, in a sense, made poets out of gifted young men like Catul­ lus and Propertius. But what kind of society produced these women? This, of course, is the great mystery. According to Ovid, one of their greatest assets was their ability to improve upon nature: in their clothes, their make-up, their hairdo, their manners, and their con­ versation they showed what cultus can do (Ovid, Ars 3.159-160). But there is much more.

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I have tried to show that, for a poet like Propertius, a woman is never a mere sex object. Even though her role as domina is mainly poetic convention, part of the language of love, we can say that these poets honestly believed in the equality of women. This idea itself is not new; it has been proposed by the Stoics, and Seneca’s lost work De matrimonio (which can be roughly reconstructed from St. Jerome, Adv. lovinianum 1.41-49)17 has much to say on the sub­ ject. But though the Stoics insisted on the intellectual, moral, and social equality of women for about two hundred years, this is still a utopia in the early Imperial Age. Nevertheless, the Roman poets whom we have considered may have been influenced by Stoic ideas: the description of ideal love that we find in Prop. 2.25.15-20 comes close to Seneca and St. Paul: “But I shall not give in! Steel blades decay with rust, and stones are worn away with dripping water. But steadfast love listens patiently to abuse even if it is innocent, and it will not be worn down. It begs forgiveness when it has been scorned, confesses its faults when it has been hurt, and comes back against its will.” Neither the Stoics nor these Roman poets succeeded in imposing their ideas on society, and for centuries the women’s status remained unchanged. The age of chivalry, with its enchanting love poetiy, did, in practice, not improve their position. In his Histoire de la Poésie Provençale I ( 1846), pp. 478ff,18 Claude Foriel has shown that in the eyes of the Provençal poets, love and marriage are almost incom­ patible. Even in the case of a husband and wife who were lovers be­ fore they got married, love was not thought to survive. In the Italian Renaissance, as Jacob Burckhardt has shown,19 man and woman are truly equal in theory as well as in practice. Emancipation is not even discussed among the upper classes, because it had become a matter of fact. It took society more than a millennium to adopt the ideas preached by the Stoics and lived, in their own way, by the Roman elegiac poets. 17 Cf. Ernst Bickel, Diatribe in Senecae philosophi fragmenta (Leipzig: Teubner, 1915); Klaus Thraede, Reallex. f. Antike u. Christentum (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1970), 8, col. 217-218. 18 Quoted by Henry Thomas Buckle, Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), p. 277. 19 Jacob Burckhardt, Die Rultur der Renaissance (Basel: B. Schwabe, 1955), III, 267.

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Autobiography and Art in Horace

WILLIAM

S. A N D E R S O N

One of the chief developments of Roman literature in­ volved the creation of genres in which the writer spoke forth in the first person, most notably, poetic satire and love elegy. At the same time that some writers were creating these personal or subjective genres, others were also modifying the once-impersonal genres and producing epic with the subjective qualities of Vergil’s Aeneid or of —in an even more marked fashion—Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is ob­ vious that Romans of the first century b .c . found it very natural to talk of themselves and to hear others speak of themselves and that egoism was not a distressing factor. On the contrary, personal writ­ ings seemed to have the appeal of ingenuous confessions that reveal the common humanity of us all. Subjective poetry was not, however, exactly the same as subjective conversation, not even when the sat­ irists claimed to be conversing informally and spontaneously or when the love elegists affected to be addressing themselves directly to the circumstances of their love. Between the poet and his honest effusions were meter, the conventions of his genre, and his own ar­

34

William S. Anderson

tistic goals, to mention but the most patent obstacles to direct com­ munication. Moreover, the poet had to consider his audience: what did it expect, to what extent could he manipulate those expectations fruitfully? Here then, we have the two elements that form my sub­ ject: autobiography on the one hand, art on the other. I should like to explore the complicated interrelationships of these two in the work of the Roman poet who, beyond all others, has utilized a subjective manner and the subjective genres, who indeed has told us more about himself than any other Roman poet while achieving an art in those genres that no other Roman poet ever equalled. I refer, of course, to Horace. We possess a reasonably good though brief biography of Horace that was compiled, on the basis of sound evidence, within about a century of his death.1 It tells us a few things that Horace himself does not tell us, but the important thing is that it agrees very well with the scattered data provided by the poet in his various poems. What it ignores, we have learned to regard as particularly important, thanks to the discoveries of Freud and modem psychiatry: we would like to know a great deal more about Horace’s childhood and forma­ tive years. For that kind of information, we are obliged to go to Horace’s poetry. Here is part of a famous early passage in Satire 1.4 where he describes his father: . . . insuevit pater optimus hoc me, ut fugerem exemplis vitiorum quaeque notando. cum me hortaretur, parce, frugaliter, atque viverem uti contentus eo quod mi ipse parasset, “nonne vides Albi ut male vivat filius, utque Baius inops? magnum documentum ne patriam rem perdere quis velit” : a turpi meretricis amore cum deterreret, “Scetani dissimilis sis” : ne sequerer moechas concessa cum venere uti possem, “deprensi non bella est fama Treboni” aiebat: "sapiens, vitatu quidque petitu sit melius, causas reddet tibi: mi satis est si

105

110

115

1 The biography of Horace was put together by Suetonius and included in his collection De poetis (ed. A. Rostagni, Turin: Biblioteca di Filologia Classica, 1964), a product of the first decade of the second century a .d . The most ele­ gant analysis of this biography and the most readable discussion of additional details provided by Horace will be found in Eduard Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 1-23.

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traditum ab antiquis morem servare tuamque, dum custodis eges, vitam famamque tueri incolumem possum; simul ac duraverit aetas membra animumque tuum, nabis sine cortice.” sic me 120 formabat puerum dictis; (S. 1.4.105-121) [My wonderful father used to pick out examples of faults and call them to my attention, so that I would avoid them. When he urged me to be thrifty, frugal, and content with what he provid­ ed me, he would say: “Don’t you see how bad a life the son of Albius has, how Baius is bankrupt? That’s strong evidence to prove that you shouldn’t waste your fathers money.” When he would deter me from a debasing love affair with a prostitute, he would say: “Don’t be like Scetanius.” To prevent me from pur­ suing willing adulteresses, he would remark: "When Trebonius was caught in bed with someone’s wife his reputation was dam­ aged.” And he added: “Someday the philosopher will explain to you better what you should avoid and what seek; I am satisfied if I can maintain the customs handed down by the past and keep your life and reputation undamaged so long as you need a guard­ ian. As soon as years have hardened your body and your charac­ ter, you will be on your own.” It was with words like these that my father shaped me when I was young.] In this era of permissive education, we may not quite comprehend a personality like that of Horace’s father, but we have little difficulty in identifying it. He was an authoritarian parent. The important point to note here, though, is that Horace is paying tribute to the authoritarian aspect of his father and claiming that, in his own moral poetry, he has inherited the same propensity.2 2 1 use the term “authoritarian” loosely and as the antithesis of the term ‘ per­ missive.” Greco-Roman New Comedy had for several centuries suggested a di­ chotomy of father types: the father who was severe, domineering, rather fright­ ening, and too often angry vs. the father who was indulgent and easygoing. Not all domineering fathers need be represented as angry, but New Comedy portrayed them this way in order to exploit their greatest dramatic and comic potentialities. Plautus’s Bacchides, adapted from Menander, shows the standard pairing of senex iratus and lepidus, Nicobulus and Philoxenus; and Terence’s plays, especially the Menandrian Adelphoe (about which I shall have more to say), frequently manipulate these two kinds of fathers. E. W. Leach (“Horace’s pater optimus and Terence’s Demea: Autobiographical Fiction and Comedy in Sermo 1,4,” AJP 92 [1971]: 616-632 makes the interesting suggestion that Horace deliberately constructs the details of this passage as “autobiographical

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William S. Anderson

Before we consider this passage more fully, let me cite a passage of somewhat similar content: When you kick out for yourself, Stephen—as I daresay you will one of these days—remember, whatever you do, to mix with gendemen. When I was a young fellow I tell you I enjoyed myself. I mixed with fine decent fellows. Everyone of us could do something. One fellow had a good voice, another fellow was a good actor, another could sing a good comic song, another was a good oarsman or a good racket player, another could tell a good story and so on. We kept the ball rolling anyhow and enjoyed our­ selves and saw a bit of life and we were none the worse for it either. But we were all gentlemen, Stephen—at least I hope we were—and bloody good honest Irishmen too. That's the kind of fellows I want you to asso­ ciate with, fellows of the right kidney, fm talking to you as a friend, Ste­ phen. I don t believe a son should be afraid of his father. As you probably have realized, this comes from Joyce’s autobio­ graphical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,3 and the son reacts with disgust to his father’s advice. The words Joyce puts into the mouth of the father of Stephen Dedalus are meant to mock the older man and help to indicate the new directions ahead of the sensitive young artist, who scorns gentlemen of his father’s type, re­ jects the easy use of the adjective good, and detects in his father al­ most everything that is wrong with Ireland and the Irish. Joyce inherited a great deal from his father, but he consciously struggled against it all through his adolescent and adult years. Of course, by any standards, James Joyce was an extraordinary person, and his reaction against his father went beyond that of most people. Nevertheless, as our own experience should tell us and as modem psychiatry has led us to believe, sons naturally react against fathers during childhood and adolescence, at certain periods more than others. And what especially provokes filial reaction is a preachy father. Was the relation between Horace and his father unusually amicable, or does Horace merely reconstruct it in that manner for artistic purposes? When we come down to it, Horace was quite as extraordinary a person in his achievements as James Joyce later was, fiction” in a recognizable comic pattern in order to define his relationship to Lutilius. Although my interpretation uses the data differently, Leach’s argument is very tempting. 3 I have cited the text from The Portable James Joyce (New York: Viking Press, 1948), p. 341.

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and we can hardly deny him the sensitivity of growing poetic aware­ ness that Joyce had as a young man. Someone might be tempted to object to the suggestion of a link between Joyce and Horace on grounds that first-century Rome dif­ fered radically from twentieth-century Dublin, and Roman sons re­ spected their fathers unquestioningly, while Irish sons were more rebellious. Let me put Horace’s autobiographical comments in a clearer perspective by citing a passage from one of Terence’s com­ edies, which was written more than a century before the satire. In this passage a father, convinced of the eflicacy of his methods of bringing up his son, describes them with passionate enthusiasm to a slave who, with barely concealed mockery, congratulates the old man.

DE. Syre, praeceptorum plenust istorum ille. SY. phy! domi habuit unde disceret. DE. fit sedulo: nil praetermitto; consuefacio; denique inspicere, tamquam in speculum, in vitas omnium iubeo atque ex aliis sumere exemplum sibi: “hoc facito.” SY. recte sane. DE. “hoc fugito.” SY. callide. DE. “hoc laudist.” SY. istaec res est. DE. “hoc vitio datur.” SY. probissime. DE. porro autem. SY. non hercle otiumst nunc mi auscultandi. piscis ex sententia nactus sum: i mihi ne corrumpantur cautiost. (Adelphoe 412-421)

415

420

[Demea. Yes, Syrus, my boy is full of good principles of that kind. Syrus. Of course. He has someone like you at home to learn from. Demea. And learn he does, all the time. I never miss a chance to teach

Syrus. Demea. Syrus. Demea. Syrus. Demea. Syrus. Demea. Syrus.

him. I get him used to it. I tell him to look at everybody’s lives as if they were mirrors, to take other people as examples. Like “do this .. r That’s really great. “Don’t do that. . . ” Excellent. “People approve of that.” Right on. “This, now, they disapprove .. Splendid. And then I go on . . . I’m sorry, but I haven’t time to hear any more now. I’ve bought some excellent fish, and I want to make sure they aren’t ruined.]

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The dramatic context of Terence's comedy leaves no doubt as to how we are to interpret the fathers words. For all his genuine at­ tempts to drill right principles into his son, this father has failed ridiculously. And the pathetic thing is that he does not know his fail­ ure and believes the slave when he uses flattery to deceive him. His son has in fact rejected the examples held up to him and has fallen in love with the first prostitute who pretended some interest in him. In Greco-Roman comedy, sons regularly go against their fathers’ wishes. The stricter and more authoritarian a father is, in fact, the more likely it is that the son will rebel against him and that the play­ wright will manipulate our sympathies in favor of the son. But even when the father is lenient, the son will disappoint him, because the young men featured in these comedies are at the age when they will test their own strength and naturally try things that fathers have told them not to do. There is, then, nothing unusual in the way Horace represents his father s using examples to deter him from harmful behavior and appealing to tradition: fathers do that. What is unusual is the totally acquiescent role that Horace assigns himself. I find it quite incredi­ ble. When he heard his father preaching to him, he surely must have felt the same restlessness and occasional resentment that any son has ever felt on such occasions, from the time of Terence to that of Joyce and right up to the present (as so many contemporary movies like The Graduate demonstrate). Two observations, I think, will confirm my argument. First, Horace did not fully imitate his father when he grew up. Although he maintained a moralistic strain throughout his poetry, he rejected the preachy, authoritarian manner. In place of the seemingly dead earnestness of the father, we find in Horace the smiling tolerance of one who knows that we all make mistakes, that an occasional love affair with a prostitute is normal, that sometimes overeating and drunkenness are appropriate. The fact that father and son choose to convey their ethical ideas differently suggests that a certain critical tension exists between them. Second, Horace seems to be using his father in Satire 1.4 to make a polemic point, not mere­ ly to provide autobiographical data. In order to convince his audi­ ence that his moral satire is designed not to wound but to instruct, Horace tells them that he has learned his methods from his father, who clearly used moral examples to educate his son. Thus, he can­ cels presuppositions that as a satirist he might resemble the caustic

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Lucilius or any standard scandalmonger: he is like a concerned father. A charming image. But does it sound convincing, when we realize that Horace was a young man of thirty at most, an ambitious young poet eager for patronage? In my opinion, the “fatherly” Horace of Satire 1.4 reveals the interworking of art and autobiography. It is generally assumed, on the basis of our meager evidence, that Horace’s father exercised the major influence on his childhood and adolescence.4 Of Horace’s mother, we know nothing; he never men­ tions her, and he shows little interest in mothers in general.5 Psychi­ atrists might make much of this unmentioned mother, perhaps by drawing interesting connections with Horace’s failure to marry and have children and by trying to isolate some warped sexuality. I 4 Cf. Fraenkel, Horace, p. 5: “The poet knows that he owes more to his father than to anyone else.” Fraenkel carefully discusses the occupation of the elder Horace. Horace never tells us the origin of his pater libertinus, and most schol­ ars assume, as I do, that his father was one of the numerous slaves imported from the Greek world. Recently, however, N. Terzaghi (“II padre di Orazio,” Atene e Roma 10 [1965]: 66-71) proposes the ingenious theory that Horace's father was an unusual case, the product of a union between a freebom citizen, Horatius, and a slave woman. Under these circumstances, the child would legal­ ly be a slave. Terzaghi hypothesizes that the father immediately emancipated his son, so that for all practical purposes Horace’s father lived as a free man, though under the stigma of ignoble birth. The evidence is by no means con­ clusive. 5 W. H. Alexander (“The Enigma of Horace’s Mother,” CP 37 [1942]: 385397) attempted to work out a theory about the unmentioned mother. Working primarily from Serm. 1.6, Alexander suggests that Horace’s father was probably a Levantine Greek, that his mother (possibly alluded to in line 36 as ignota matre) might have been a Levantine Jew, and that Horace was ashamed to mention her in the face of the marked hostility to Jews in Rome. Again, the evi­ dence is tenuous. By examining the contexts in which Horace uses the word mater and its adjective, one may arrive at the following conclusions: Horace uses mater mostly in conventional situations such as would be well defined by poetic and social traditions. Twice, he mentions the dominating mother type, in C. 3.6.39-40 (a patent allusion to the distant historical past of Italy) and Epist. 1.1.22 (reference to a free mother in an average free family); neither of these situations applies to himself, and Horace attaches no special emotion whatsoever to the mother. E. E. Best, Jr., in CJ 65 (1969-1970): 199-204, discusses the influence of certain mothers of prominent Roman families upon the careers of their sons. Educated mothers ( mater docta) often inspired their sons to become great orators and politicians. However, Horace’s situation is by no means similar. Nor is it like that of the poet Persius, whose twice-widowed mother presumably carefully planned the training that influenced his short career: she was a woman of good birth and considerable education and influence.

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might remind those who wish to essay this Freudian theme that the biography provides us with one extraordinary fact, one that has per­ plexed and disturbed classicists for centuries. In his mature years, we are told, Horace placed mirrors all about his bedroom so that he could enjoy various perspectives of himself and his mistress when in sexual intercourse!6 But rather than work in a vacuum, I would prefer to concentrate on the father, about whom we know a few things. He was a slave of unknown origin, who had been freed by his master and later settled in Venusia, earning a modest in­ come as collector of money for an auctioneer. Although this back­ ground hardly entitled him to large ambitions, Horace's father de­ cided to take his son from Venusia and give him the best possible education in Rome.7 Every day, he attended young Horace to school and served him more as a slave than as a father. What did he intend for his son? According to Horace, his father had no grandiose plans and would not have been ashamed if the son had followed him in the lowly role of collector for auctions.8 I am not so sure of that. When we try to produce a coherent sketch of Horace’s father, using the evidence Horace gives us, our interpretation differs from the one Horace emphasizes. The man who insists on driving homespun morality into the heart of his son appeals to the ancestral cus­ toms of a culture to which he came as a slave. As soon as he has a little money, he transports himself and his son to the capital city and sacrifices all in order that his son may have the same educational op­ portunities as the sons of the most distinguished Roman families. Why? Because the Horatian pattern resembles the pattern of many immigrant families in nineteenth-century America, we tend to as­ sume that Horace’s father wanted his son to make good in terms of the Roman dream. All that education would enable Horace to be­ come a rhetorician and politician, not a collector or ordinary business­ man.9 It may be true that the fathers authoritarianism confined itself to moralistic admonitions, but I think it more likely that he also 6 So Suetonius: “ad res Venerias intemperantior traditur; nam speculate cubiculo scorta dicitur habuisse disposita, ut quocumque respexisset ibi ei imago coitus referretur” (p. 119 Rostagni). 7 These details are provided by Horace himself in Serm. 1.6.71-82. 8 nec timuit sibi ne vitio quis verteret olim si praeco parvas aut, ut fuit ipse, coactor mercedes sequerer; ñeque ego essem questus. (S. 1.6.85-87) 9 Such a career was apparently planned for Vergil by his farmer-father, foi

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urged his son toward specific goals. Horace admired his father, re­ spected him for all his sacrifices, and perhaps went along with the ambitions that were held out to him. But by 35 B.C., the date of our Satire, the immigrant dream had been exploded. Horace had failed to make a successful political start because he chose the losing side at the battle of Philippi, and about the same time his father lost his money and died. Without money and political support, Horace had no chance of success in ordinary ambitions. Another early satire (1.6) tries to make Horace the model of un­ ambitious integrity.10 To accomplish this, the satirist most ingenious­ ly exploits both his friendship with Maecenas, the second most pow­ erful man in Rome, and his now-dead ex-slave father. His friendship with Maecenas has no political overtones, he claims, because he did not push himself on the great man, and Maecenas can distinguish between true friendship and political opportunism.11 Indeed, Mae­ cenas has freed himself of prejudices and does not let Horace’s ig­ noble birth interfere with an honest recognition of his merits; and, from Horace’s viewpoint, it is his ex-slave father who has given him the character that wins Maecenas’s affection. Now Joyce might have said that his father made him an anti-Irish writer, and it would have been true in a certain sense. We know, however, that Joyce’s father had no such designs for his eldest son. Similarly, we may doubt that Horace’s father intended to make his son what he became. But Horace could later affirm that his poetic success and the creative friendship with Maecenas resulted12 from the tension between his own sensitivity, his failures, and his father’s driving purposes. Once again, autobiography and art interact in this Satire. Horace affectionately credits his father for making him the happy man he is Catullus and Ovid by their middle-class parents. In each case, however, the son exploited his Roman training in rhetoric to enhance his poetic talent. 10 For an able analysis of the main themes of this poem, see Niall Rudd, The Satires of Horace (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1966), pp. 36-53. 11 Horace gives his account of how the friendship developed in 49-64. 12 I am offering a theory to account for what Horace says of himself, and it may be wrong. Not everyone in Augustan Rome would have accepted it. One can infer from what Horace says about the backbiting he suffered (S. 1.6.46-52) that some contemporaries regarded the poet as a typical climber. As they saw it, he had used his money while it lasted to buy himself a military command at Philippi; then, when the money was gone, Horace had tried to worm his way into friendship with powerful Maecenas in order to exploit the opening that the

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at the time of writing; and he boasts of this ex-slave instead of apolo­ gizing for him. But had Horace’s father been alive, one might have heard different ideas from him: he might have understood his son no better than those who attacked Horace’s supposed ambitions. I believe that we can infer the powerful influence of Hor­ ace’s father on his childhood, but I doubt that this time in the poet’s life was precisely as free of tension as Horace later implies. He cred­ its his father with the hard-won results of his own personal develop­ ment without ever expressly revealing the older man’s purposes. In the authoritarian portrait he produces of the ex-slave, I find it dif­ ficult to detect a man who would readily acquiesce in his son’s choice to be a struggling poet. It is probably also significant that Horace mentions his father only in these two early satires that I have so far discussed and in one late passage, which I shall discuss. If the father dominated the poet’s youth as much as Horace claims, if Horace feels the affection for this father that he states he does, we might expect more references to the old man, at least in the form of straight autobiographical comments. The fact is, though, that none of the subjective confessions in Horace’s poetry is straight autobiog­ raphy. In his first published poems, Book I of the Satires, Horace purposely defined himself in terms of his father, to suggest paradoxi­ cally that he was identical with his excellent father in using homespun morality and pursuing the simplest of goals in life. Later, when he was successful and had a villa in the Sabine Hills and powerful friends in Rome, when he was reckoned among the foremost artists of Roman poetry, the chasm between simple father and sophisticat­ ed son was too obvious to bridge by ingenious art. And Horace’s father disappears from the poetry. I do not mean that he disap-

friendship would give him to power and money. Such critics would have been disposed to dismiss Horace's words of filial affection as utter lies. For my part, I believe that Horace did honor his father and give him credit for the happy, if unanticipated, results that came from his fathers concerned upbringing. But I daresay that Horace knew his poetic career would have surprised the old man. Those critics more expert in psychoanalysis may find that these data suggest an­ other interpretation. My friend John Trimble has mentioned that he detects in Horace's behavior signs of what is called a ‘ réaction-formation”; that is, Horace may neurotically have been covering up his difficulties with his father by hon­ oring him greatly after his death. See Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1945), pp. 151-153.

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peared from Horace’s affections and gratitude, only that art no long­ er needed that kind of autobiography. I have suggested that the battle of Philippi proved to be a turning point in Horace’s life, because it caused him to discard most of the goals that his father had encouraged him to aim at.13 Horace does not tell us about the difficulties he encountered in the years between the military disaster and his successful meeting with Maecenas, who became his friend and patron (a new kind of father). We know that he held a civil service post in Rome, but it is not difficult to guess that he merely performed his job while his mind was elsewhere. Slowly he adjusted to the disaster, began to write poetry that won him friends among the poets, and gradually from the failure of his political ambitions emerged a new and more viable career as poet. From the vantage point of success twenty years later, Horace no longer interpreted Philippi as a personal disaster, but as a divine blessing, the miraculous intervention of some benevolent force that freed him for the happiness and sense of power that he now felt. Once he may have regretted escaping with his life from the battle­ field. By the time he wrote Ode 2.7 ( at least a decade after the early satires), he could represent his survival as miraculous preservation. Art collaborates with autobiography to produce a charming “myth.” As he now tells it, in the moment of rout, he had abandoned his shield ignobly and was fleeing, when suddenly the god Mercury lifted him up and transported him in thick mist away from danger to safety.14 Why did Mercury intervene? Horace is not so gauche as to boast of his successful career, but he implies that Mercury, as 13 It is interesting to observe that the Suetonian biography treats Horace as though his life first became significant at Philippi : it offers no details about his youth. In a recent article, K. Büchner (“Horace et Épicure,” Assoc. Guillaume Budé, Actes du viiie Congrès [1969], pp. 457-469) focuses on the trauma of Philippi in a different fashion. He argues that one can detect in Book I of the Satires a strenuous effort by Horace to cope with his loss of faith in Roman val­ ues by giving serious thought to the values offered by Epicureanism. The defeat at Philippi was both a shock to his political ideals and a permanent blow to possible political ambitions. 14 Critics generally agree that Horace’s self-conscious reference to the aban­ donment of his shield, while it no doubt could fit his actual behavior at Philippi, was meant in this poem to align him with the celebrated Greek poets Archi­ lochus and Alcaeus, who boasted of their unheroic flight in time of war. Thus, the allusion to the Greek poets and the mythical account of escape form part of a coherent whole.

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messenger of the gods and inventor of the lyric instrument, has saved Horace from political ambitions so that he could develop his special divinely blessed talents as poet. Horace likes to use this motif of miraculous preservation to define, usually with enough irony to take away the tone of boasting, his special vocation as poet. Such a motif is a feature of the Odes, but appears originally in S. 9 of the first book of Satires.15 Once when Horace was struggling helplessly to escape a leachlike fellow whose ambitions were worse than his mere garrulity, Apollo, he claims, intervened and rescued him from certain extinction. Why? Because he was an innocent poet, both helpless and unfit for the ambitious world in which he was placed by the bore. Apollo’s rescue, like Mercury’s intervention in Ode 2.7, borrows from Homeric battle motifs and thus gives the scene exaggerated epic tones that enable us to smile with the poet at his escape. Perhaps the most obviously amusing of these Horatian myths is the famous Ode 1.22. Horace reports that he was singing a love poem he wrote in honor of his girl Lalage when along came a gigantic wolf. However, even though the wolf was huge and Horace unarmed, the wolf turned tail and fled. Why? Obviously not because Horace’s voice was so terrible that it frightened the beast, but because a love poet bears a charmed life and passes unscathed through all dangers! Maybe Horace once did see a wolf for a second on his Sabine farm, but, if so, art has taken over autobiography from that point. Another miraculous escape occurred when Horace was strolling on his property and a dead tree fell unexpectedly, barely missing the poet’s unoffending head. Out of this personal experience the artist has created several interesting themes in different poems. The first time he refers to his escape, in Ode 2.13, Horace affects to have just gone through the soul-shaking episode. Naturally, then, he begins by cursing the tree. When he has spent his emotions on that motif, he reflects more reasonably on the problem of death, reaching the familiar conclusion that death is unavoidable and unforeseeable. As he ponders this theme, he speculates on what it would have been like to be dead, and in his imaginary picture of the dead Horace he implicitly explains why he was not killed. If he had died, he con­ fidently declares, he would have gone to the special part of the 15 See my article, “Horace the Unwilling Warrior: Satire I, 9,” AJP 77 (1956):148-166.

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underworld set aside for the greatest poets, who by their songs are able to triumph over the miseries associated with death. Their eter­ nal triumph over death is but a permanent version of Horace’s tem­ porary escape: he has been preserved to be a poet in his own world and, when finally he has completed his poetic mission on earth, to pass on to the immortality of his Greek models, Sappho and Alcaeus. This special destiny of the poet, which explains on one level the miracle of Horace’s life, impels the poet to use his miraculous escapes artistically to contrast with the more ordinary careers of others, whose destiny is bleak death that nevertheless cannot make them do something with the precious moments of the present. As Horace keeps observing in the Odes, we are not only not going to escape the finality of dying, but we are also so foolish in our preoccupations as to be enduring a living death. So Horace’s happy escape of 2.13 is immediately contrasted in 2.14 with the inevitability of Postumus’s miserable death following his miserable existence.16 Twice Horace builds a single poem out of the contrast between his special provi­ dence as poet—proved by his escape from the damned tree—and Maecenas’s unenviable distinction as statesman. In each of these poems, Horace credits a different divinity with his preservation. Al­ though both deities suggest concern for the poet, their other asso­ ciations explain why Horace has manipulated the autobiographical facts and as a result produced quite different poems. In Ode 2.17, the occasion is Maecenas’s melancholy and hypochondriac presenti­ ment of death. Horace jokes with his friend, asserts on the basis of comic manipulation of astrology and the zodiac that Maecenas will never die before himself, and then cites two incidents that sup­ posedly prove the special destinies of each man. When Maecenas was seriously ill, he staged a miraculous recovery. Why? Obviously because the supreme god Jupiter acted to save such an important man. With a smile, Horace then adduces the incident of the dead tree as a humble parallel to Maecenas’s noble escape. It was Faunus (the Roman equivalent of bucolic Pan) who intervened on Horace’s behalf. As son of Mercury, Faunus watches over the favorites of Mercury. By giving the credit for his escape to Faunus, Horace de­ liberately portrays himself as a humble rustic and thus sets up an 16 I have discussed the relationship between 2.13 and 14 more fully in “Two Odes of Horace’s Book Two,” Calif. Studies in Classical Antiquity 1 (1968): 59-61.

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effective contrast between himself and the urban politician Mae­ cenas; bucolic Faunus is opposed to Maecenas’s Jupiter. Behind these contrasts, which maintain the illusion of Horace’s humility, lurks a different contrast: Horace is happy and attuned to the reali­ ties of life, and he with his poetic insights must comfort the great, but greatly miserable, Maecenas. In still another ode, 3.8, the autobiographical occasion is Horace’s celebration of the anniversary of his escape, when he was almost “funeraled” ( as he comically puts it with a word made for the poem, funeratus) by the blow of the tree. Here, for a very specific reason, he provides for us the date of the near tragedy and hence of the an­ niversary celebration: it was March first. March first in the Roman world had great public significance as the day when husbands sacri­ ficed to Juno, goddess of marriage, and gave presents to their wives. Yet here is Horace, a notoriously unmarried type, conducting his private rites, sacrificing not to Juno but to Liber (or Bacchus)! A comic paradox to begin the poem with. We know that Bacchus could function at times as a patron of poets; Horace’s Odes show that he recognized this motif.17 However, as everyone knows, Bacchus main­ ly connotes wine and the pleasures to be gained from drinking. When he chose to credit Bacchus for his escape, Horace was plan­ ning the most effective contrast with Juno and the more sedate cere­ monies proper to the commemoration of marriage. Then he goes from this initial humorous contrast to draw a more penetrating contrast between himself, the contented poet who has come to terms with life, and Maecenas, the anxious statesman who worries himself sick over the dangers that threaten Rome. Horace then advises Maecenas to drink, to seize the pleasures offered by the moment.18 In one of the great Roman Odes, Horace draws all his miraculous escapes together, explains them pointedly as the work of the Muses, and then goes on to demonstrate poetically that the quality that works in the poet and accounts for his greatness is also at work in the ideal statesman (though in somewhat different terms). He men17 Steele Commager ( The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962], pp. 337-341) ably analyzes the way Horace in C. 2.19 presents “Bacchus, the inspirer of poetry.” 18 This same contrast between statesman and poet is most fully elaborated in C. 3.29. There, in addition to the pleasures of drinking, Horace offers Maecenas the pastoral bliss of his Sabine villa.

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tions the rout at Philippi, the nearly fatal incident involving the tree, and another occasion, apparently a near drowning, about which we have no other information. vester, Camenae, vester in arduos tollor Sabinos, seu mihi frigidum Praeneste seu Tibur supinum seu liquidae placuere Baiae. vestris amicum fontibus et choris non me Philippis versa acies retro, devota non exstinxit arbos, nec Sicula Palinurus unda. (C. 3.4.21-28) [I belong to you, o Muses, I belong to you, whether I go up into the Sabine Hills or sloping Tivoli or whether my delight is the water of Baiae. Because I was a friend of your fountains I was not killed during the flight from Philippi nor when the damned tree fell on me nor by the seas off Sicily.] Horace’s experience with the ubiquitous benevolence of the Muses convinces him that his future will be secure, wherever he may be, in the flesh or in the spirit. His poems will survive him. The quality that Horace isolates to define his vocation as poet and the noble vocation of Augustus, the ideal statesman, is pietas. The poet, by dedicating himself selflessly to poetry, establishes a firm link with the divine realm through the Muses, deities themselves. Without the assistance of the Muses, he can accomplish nothing important. That same selfless devotion to divine purposes impels the ideal statesman, who chooses to end self-aggrandizing wars in order to work for the well-being of his people in peacetime. This is the poem in which Horace most clearly defines his concept of the poet, and here, though art is very prominent, we may catch the autobiographical passion that encourages Horace to set his métier on a level with that of Augustus. It was precisely this sense of personal integrity that enabled him to say no both to Maecenas and to Augustus when they tried to restrict his freedom as poet and use him for purposes that they considered valid.19 Whether or not they were valid, Horace 19 In Epistle 1.7 Horace advocates independence in the face of demands that might be made on him by his friend and patron Maecenas. However, we probably should not use this Epistle as a historical document to prove that Maecenas did in fact mistreat Horace. In Epistle 2.1 Horace exhibits independ­ ence in his relations with Augustus, which tends to substantiate the story told

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knew that the life he needed and wanted depended on total commit­ ment to the Muses, absolute pietas. In this same magnificent ode Horace describes the only experience of his infancy that he or anyone else ever records. When I think of what Freud did with the sole infant experience reported by Leonar­ do da Vinci, I somewhat tremble for Horace, but I shall go ahead.20 Here are Horace's words: me fabulosae Vulture in Apulo nutricis extra limen Apuliae ludo fatigatumque somno fronde nova puerum palumbes texere, mirum quod foret omnibus, quicumque celsae nidum Acherontiae saltusque Bantinos et arvum pingue tenent humilis Forenti, ut tuto ab atris corpore viperis dormirem et ursis, ut premerer sacra lauroque collataque myrto, non sine dis animosus infans (C. 3.4.9-20)

10

15

20

[When I was a baby, I crawled away from my nurse’s house near Mt. Voltur in Apulia and, tired out from play, I fell asleep. As I lay there in the woods, miraculously, doves covered me up with fresh leaves, an absolute marvel to all who live in the region, how I slept on, safe from black vipers and bears, covered by sacred laurel and heaps of myrtle. For not without divine bless­ ing was I, a mere baby, alive.] I am prepared to believe that little Horace crawled away from his nurse once and that, after a long search, she found him asleep in a pile of leaves. The rest of the details, however, resemble artistic elaborations designed to give the incident special significance. After all, who could verify that doves could and did cover the baby with by Suetonius that Augustus tried to make Horace his private secretary and was refused. See Fraenkel, Horace, pp. 17-20. 20 See Freud's essay, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1947). Leonardo re­ portedly remembered an odd childhood experience when a bird, apparently a kite, flew down while he was sleeping and struck him repeatedly on his lips with its tail. Freud detected many veiled sexual references in the details of this childhood memory.

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leaves? Why should leaves protect the baby from vipers and bears, and who can say that they, in fact, did save him? This artistic em­ bellishment of autobiographical fact in no way illuminates the nature of Horace. Instead, it serves to confirm his myth that from birth the Muses had consecrated Horace as their servant, and that he was destined to be the great poet he became. In this first incident of miraculous preservation we see the archetype of all the others. The first three books of Odes, almost ninety poems, were com­ posed over a ten-year period, and published together in 23 B.C. when Horace was forty-two. Although Horace continues to use the personal manner in his lyrics, the person we encounter in the Odes is not the same as the speaker in the Satires. Nor is it enough to observe that Horace was considerably older in the Odes than in the Satires. True, when we add a decade to age thirty, we radically change our nature, as most of us over forty regretfully admit. How­ ever, when we read the Odes, the age of the poet does not seem important. In fact, if one did not know the date of the Satires, I daresay that most readers would guess that the satirist was older than the lyric poet: the moralistic contents of the Satires suggest an older and wiser author, while the lighter contents of the erotic and drinking poems suggest that they were composed by a younger man. Generic conventions also account in large measure for the manner in which autobiographical detail is employed in the Satires and Odes. Inasmuch as a satirist is supposed to be a simple down-to-earth man, Horace can readily introduce his ex-slave father in the Satires to explain both his homespun ethics and his lack of ambition. He boasts of his father and at the same time denies himself the rank of poet in Satire 1.4. On the other hand, when the satirist turns into a lyric poet, those simple intimate facts about the elder Horace no longer serve his purpose. If there is one thing Horace wishes to emphasize in the lyrics, it is that he is a poet with a sacred vocation. Therefore, when the lyric poet looks into his past for relevant ex­ periences, he no longer consciously recalls his father and all the sacrifices that started Horace on the practical road toward his career. Instead he colors an incident from his infancy in such a way as to exclude his father totally and introduce as his permanent guardians, the Muses. Earlier, Horace affectionately remembered how his father had sworn to protect his life and honor as long as he was a youth; the childhood episode cited in Ode 3.4 replaces Horaces

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father with the Muses. I think that as Horace wrote the Odes he realized that he had left his father’s narrow world far behind, and that he could no longer satisfactorily account for the gulf that now separated him from his youth except in terms of the Muses. The events at Philippi may indeed have effected the change, but Horace now began to see in other events, even a half-remembered incident from his babyhood in Apulia, the mystique of a special destiny, miraculous preservation from danger, and a consecration as poet that supposedly determined his entire life.21 In keeping with this total dedication to the Muses, Horace throughout the Odes published in 23 B.C. impresses us as a man who has not only replaced ordinary political ambitions with his commit­ ment to poetry, but also rejected riches for a modest existence and sublimated amatory passion in his cool poems about love. Being a poet compensates him richly for all the frenetic and disappointing preoccupations of most men. As he enters his forties, Horace finds that poetry will comfort him as he grows old. I see that motif in the famous and elusive poem that Horace wrote on the Fountain of Bandusia. If we knew precisely where this humble spring was lo­ cated, we might be able to control the autobiographical detail better. As it is, some scholars place it in Apulia where Horace grew up, and others are equally certain that they still see the spring today spurt­ ing from the hillside above the Sabine farm that Maecenas gave the mature poet. Nevertheless, whether the fountain represents an al­ lusion to Horace’s youth or to his maturity, the poem suggests that Horace, by sacrificing a spirited young goat to the water, is sym­ bolically consecrating his own youthful passions. As the cool waters are briefly dyed with the hot red blood of the kid and then run clear and cold again, as those same chill springs overcome weariness and piercingly hot weather, so, in a sense, when Horace honors that cool comfort, he gracefully yields his own hot passions to the soothing actions of the Muses, the source of his life’s inspiration.22 In short, 21 Similarly, Horace briefly looks back at his early years and humble origin in C. 3.30, the final poem of his first collection of Odes. The phrase ex hurrdli potens / princeps (12-13) suggests a dramatic political achievement, and only the words that follow prove that Horace is recording the miracle of his poetic success. The same ideas return in C. 4.3, written about 17 B.C .; Horace empha­ sizes the way the Muses pick out the future poet at the time of his birth. 22 For other interpretations of the symbolism of this poem, see F. Gillen, “Symbolic Dimensions in Horace’s Poetry,” CB 37 (1961): 65-67; M. R. Lef-

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during the rich years when Horace was composing his masterpieces, the Odes, art not only colored autobiography, but also became auto­ biography; for poetry was Horace’s life. In the fifteen years that followed before his death in 8 B.C., Horace, growing older and feeling his age, explored again his own existential purposes and redefined his relation to poetry. Instead of the passionate regrets for youth that make the poems of the older Yeats so exciting, we find in Horace a graceful resignation to age, an awareness of his limited powers that impels him to abandon lyric and the once-cherished themes of the Odes. Not that he gives up poetry. Far from it. In the opening poem of his next collection, pub­ lished within three years of the Odes, Horace declares that he is henceforth putting aside verse and other light matters ( Epist . 1.1.10), but since he utters this sentiment in a good hexameter line in the course of a carefully wrought poem, we know that he is not aban­ doning poetry. The hexameter, the subject matter, the express state­ ment that the older poet does not feel the same as the younger lyric writer, and finally the more serious tone of these lines indicate that Horace is choosing a new genre to match his own new interests. At first sight, these new poems resemble the Satires in form, and we wonder why Horace has reverted to the poetry of his twenties. But when we look closer, we begin to note significant differences. The new works are Letters, ostensibly private communications addressed to friends, in which he shares personal moral concerns. In these let­ ters Horace encourages young people to be serious about life, insists on the merit of life in the country away from the entanglements of the city, yet never calls attention to himself as poet, as confident critic of others.23 And at the end of the collection he offers this miniature autobiography to his audience: me libertino natum patre et in tenui re maiores pennas nido extendisse loqueris, ut quantum generi demas virtutibus addas;

20

kowitz, “The Ilex in o fans Bandusiae” CJ 58 (1962): 63-67; and Commager, Odes of Horace, pp. 322-324. 23 See M. J. McGann, Studies in Horace’s First Book of Epistles (Brussels: Collection Latomus 100, 1969). In his discussion of the conclusion of Epist. 1.20, McGann supports my views: “The autobiographical sketch which ends the book is appropriately concerned with Horace as a person and in particular as a moral person rather than as a poet” (p. 86).

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William S. Anderson me primis Vrbis belli placuisse domique; corporis exigui, praecanum, solibus aptum, irasci celerem, tamen ut placabilis essem. ( Epist. 1.20.20-25)

25

[You may say that I was bom of an ex-slave father and in strait­ ened circumstances, but flew from my parental nest on broader wings; so what you subtract from my family you should add to my own good qualities. I have pleased the foremost men of the city in war and peace. I am short, prematurely gray, addicted to sunbathing, quick-tempered, but also easily calmed down.] In this sole reference to his father since Satire 1.6, at least fifteen years earlier, Horace uses his parent only to define his humble be­ ginnings. Neither the father nor the Muses are given credit for Horace s success. The implicit suggestion is that he has done it him­ self. What does this self-portrait mean? It means, I think, that for the purposes of the Epistles, where he talks of himself as a searcher for the right way to live, Horace wishes to represent his past as a personal achievement, one that promises success to his present search. Notice that he does not even represent himself as a poet. If the Epistles have introduced a new autobiographical manner, in which Horace virtually ignores his father and seems to slight the Muses and the variety of tutelary deities (Apollo, Mercury, Faunus, Bacchus) that he associated with himself earlier, we may well ask what has happened to the rich theme of personal salvation. Salvation by the Muses alone is worse than irrelevant to the theme of the Epis­ tles: it contradicts the point that Horace now emphasizes, that salva­ tion is essentially ethical and is achieved by individual effort. Hor­ ace no longer uses the genial myth about the Muses because he no longer feels the Muses so close and realizes that poetic creation re­ sults from a great deal of hard intellectual and moral effort. Writing an epistle was a grueling job for a highly conscious artist. Uncon­ scious inspiration, that charming madness (amabilis insania ) which occasionally possessed him in the writing of the Odes, no longer worked. Sternly rejecting such uncontrolled inspiration, such poetic madness, Horace demanded of himself full rationality as he poetical­ ly worked out the vital ethical themes of the Epistles. Thus, if the poet is to be saved, he must first relinquish his belief an sheer inspiration: so Horace now urges. In three important places in the Epistles, Horace describes playfully (but with serious intent)

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the desperate state of the poet who insanely trusts to mere inspira­ tion and will not be saved from his madness. There is an old Roman saying to the effect that saving someone who does not want to be rescued is the same as killing him. Horace ironically applies this say­ ing to the possessed poet: since such a person clutches wildly to his delusions, coming to his senses is a traumatic experience, and per­ haps it would be a mercy to let him stay mad. The first time this theme of trying to save the deluded poet occurs, Horace is, so to speak, arguing with himself. In the Epistle containing the autobio­ graphical portrait which I cited above, Horace argues against a tend­ ency in himself to seek publication and quick fame. His alter ego, the character with whom he is arguing, is represented as the Book, the collection of Epistles, which rushes out to display itself coquettishly in public. That popularizing attitude, Horace warns, will doom the Book to rapid oblivion, but why try to save someone who will not be saved?24 The very form of this internal dialogue shows that Horace has indeed opted for a new kind of salvation. Again, in the long Epistle to Florus, Horace describes the perma­ nent struggle confronting the true poet and affects to feel too old to continue the battle. Ironically claiming that he would prefer to be a writer who is insane ( scriptor delirus) and happy than one who is sane and miserable, he tells the story of a somewhat dotty old Greek who had a number of harmless aesthetic delusions that made him happy. Well, his family took the old man to a psychiatrist, who cured him. Instead of being grateful, the old man complained that his friends had not saved him, but killed him, for they had taken away his pleasant delusions.25 And that story is supposed to prove the advantages of being insane. The recurrence of this same sequence in the Ars poetica in a context where Horace clearly chooses to be sane confirms the irony of this anecdote. As he says, the beginning, the very source of writing poetry properly, is the capacity to use one’s reason: “scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons” ( A.P. 309). But the poet who trusts in inspiration is a madman for whom there is no help. Look at the poet-philosopher Empedocles. He wanted to be regarded as a god and threw himself into the molten crater of Mt. Etna. A hopeless case. You just have to let poets kill themselves, 24 Epistle 1.20.16: quis enim invitum servare laboret? 25 Epistle 2.2.138-139: pol me occidistis, amici, / non servastis.

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because, if you save them against their will, it’s the same as killing them.26 This new view of the poet’s role treats harshly the pleasant auto­ biographical constructions of the Odes and the ingenuously appeal­ ing manipulations of Horace s father in the Satires. In his final auto­ biography, Horace made his life a steady progress toward truth and sharply curtailed the significance of poetry in it all: Romae nutriri mihi contigit, atque doceri iratus Grais quantum nocuisset Achilles, adiecere bonae paulo plus artis Athenae, scilicet ut vellem curvo dinoscere rectum, atque inter silvas Academi quaerere verum. dura sed emovere loco me tempora grato, civilisque rudem belli tulit aestus in arma Caesaris Augusti non responsura lacertis. unde simul primum me dimisere Philippi, decisis humilem pennis inopemque patemi et laris et fundi, paupertas impulit audax ut versus facerem: sed quod non desit habentem quae poterunt umquam satis expurgare cicutae, ni melius dormire putem quam scribere versus? ( Epist. 2.2.41-54)

45

50

[I happened to be raised in Rome, where I was taught from the Iliad how much the wrath of Achilles injured the Greeks. In noble Athens I then acquired a little more education, enough to want to distinguish the straight from the crooked and to seek the truth among the groves of Plato’s Academy. However, hard times forced me to leave this pleasant place; the tide of civil war carried me off, an utter tyro, to join ranks that were not destined to match the might of Augustus’s army. As soon as Philippi’s de­ feat released me, humiliated, my wings clipped, deprived of my fathers estate, I was driven by rash poverty to produce verse. But now that I have enough to live on, I would be incurably in­ sane if I didn’t prefer sleeping peacefully to writing verse.] I do not mean to minimize the ironic notes in this passage; the artist is still shaping his autobiography. Thus, the assertion that pov­ erty drove him to poetry (as though it were a means of profit) and the claim that, since his poetic efforts have insured him a guaranteed 26A.P. 466-467: sit ius liceatque perire poetis, / invitum qui servat idem facit occidenti.

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income, he is now ready to retire from this painful and sordid occu­ pation, must be viewed as gross exaggerations. But the total scheme for his life is unified: it is self-education, marked by a series of inter­ ruptions, leading toward his present commitment to ethical intro­ spection. Therefore, when he refers to his education in Rome, he now talks of the ethical lessons he learned from books, and Greek books at that, not the role of his father in passing on homespun lore, not the self-sacrifice of the old man that gave him the opportunity to live in Rome in the first place. Again, it was his father who somehow scraped together the money to send Horace to Athens, but Horace disregards that point to discuss the philosophic enhancements of his training. Joining Brutus’s army and fighting the disastrous battle of Philippi counts now as a hiatus in his ethical progress. We are not allowed to speculate on Horace’s abortive military career as the last effect of his father’s influence on the son to enter politics, nor does Horace try to read into his survival at Philippi the personal myth of salvation by the Muses. Writing poetry now becomes a stopgap, an­ other enforced hiatus in his ethical progress. Horace has come a long way from Satire 1.4 where he professed uncritical admiration for his simple father and thereby defined the nature of his poetic effort. I have been attempting to show the complex and changing inter­ relation of autobiography and art in the works of the most subjective of all Roman poets. Although it is tempting to doubt that some of the so-called personal experiences ever occurred, I believe that we can be satisfied for the time being that almost every episode, wheth­ er factual or not, has been shaped by the artist to fit the genre, to lend itself well to the particular kind of self-analysis of each period, and to make the most effective impression on the audience. When Horace, an unknown poet between twenty-five and thirty years of age, was writing the first book of Satires, he still felt the powerful in­ fluence of his recently dead father. In order to win favor for his kind of poetry, he used his father to define his own personality and purposes, quite consciously selecting only those details of his father’s activities that fitted his needs. What is consistently unmentioned and what probably most distorts our perception of the father’s influence is the exact career he had in mind for Horace. I strongly doubt that the father ever envisioned that all his sacrifices would result in a poet. In later years, Horace tended to deny his father by stressing how great he had become, how high he had soared from his humble be­

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ginning, whether through the intervention of the Muses (C. 3.30.1116) or by his own rational efforts ( Epist . 2.2.41-54). In the case of Horace, the complex interrelation of autobiography and art is particularly interesting because he is not merely trying to twist facts in order to make himself important. What he is doing is showing how the career of the artist, the responsibilities of the poet affect his own experiences at different times, even oblige him to re­ interpret earlier experiences. The ambitious young poet, who thought he could reprove his readers in satire and do a better artistic job than Lucilius, eventually became convinced that his talent lay in writing lyric poetry. Horace viewed his success in this genre as that of a “friend of the Muses,” a man saved from Philippi to write poetry in the tradition of distinguished Greek poets, such as Sappho and Al­ caeus. So the Odes contained little myths about his personal salvation and accounted for his phenomenal creativity during that decade by presenting him more or less as a servant of the Muses. Then came a new stage, perhaps foreshadowed by such late Odes as that on the Fountain of Bandusia, in which the poet’s advancing age increased his self-consciousness and made him no longer content with lyric or the ostensibly unthinking, almost impersonal response to the Muses. His art became cerebral again, resembling in that respect the art of the Satires, but the morality focused on the poet’s personal develop­ ment; he no longer pretended to know it all and criticize others from that superior perspective. He was trying to save his own soul, and his poetry described his efforts. When he was writing the Odes, art be­ came autobiography because poetry was Horace’s life. In this final stage of development, we must reverse the equation. Through the way Horace rejects or depreciates his earlier poetic concerns, we glimpse a new awareness: his autobiography is now poetry because his life is the only fitting poetic theme. For his older readers at least, this is the ultimate and most satisfactory integration of two uneasy factors, art and autobiography. Horace is constructing his own un­ derstanding of life as he produces his epistolary poetry. And after all, isn’t this a most profound application of the Greek word poiesis?

Some Trees in Virgil and Tolkien

K E N N E T H J. R E C K F O R D

I want to offer a meditation on some trees in Virgil and Tolkien.1 1 shall be concerned mainly with the theme of continuity through change. I want to show, not so much that Virgil influenced Tolkien—although the Lord of the Rings evidently has western as well as northern roots—as that a deep affinity exists between Virgil’s mind and Tolkien s and may be observed in the way they perceive life, in their sense of the relation between heroic choice and achieve­ ment, on the one hand, and time, change, loss, sadness, uncertainty, 1 This paper represents an enlarged version of part of my paper given at the Symposium; the rest seemed less suitable to the written than the spoken word. For Virgil, I have used the text of R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). The translations are from The Aeneid of Virgil, translated by C. Day Lewis (Oxford, 1952; New York: A Doubleday Anchor Book, 1953; reprinted by permission of A. D. Peters and Company, the Translator’s Literary Estate, and the Hogarth Press); though not always literal, they give some sense of Virgil’s poetry. Passages from Tolkien are quoted (by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company) from The Lord of the Rings, vols. I—III (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965).

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and suffering, on the other. Or, more poetically, in the way they look at trees. Let me begin with Tolkien. Up in the mountains, Gandalf shows Aragorn a long-hidden sapling of the White Tree of Gondor and says: “This is your realm, and the heart of the greater realm that shall be. The Third Age of the world is ended, and the new age is begun; and it is your task to order its beginning and to preserve what may be preserved. For though much has been saved, much must now pass away; and the power of the Three Rings also is ended. And all the lands that you see, and those that lie around about them, shall be dwellings of Men. For the time comes of the Dominion of Men, and the Elder Kindred shall fade or depart.” “I know it well, dear friend,” said Aragorn; "but I would still have your counsel.” "Not for long now,” said Gandalf. “The Third Age was my age. I was the Enemy of Sauron; and my work is finished. I shall go soon. The bur­ den must lie now upon you and your kindred.” “But I shall die,” said Aragorn. “For I am a mortal man, and though be­ ing what I am and of the race of the West unmingled, I may have life far longer than other men, yet that is but a little while; and when those who are now in the wombs of women are bom and have grown old, I too shall grow old. And who then shall govern Gondor and those who look to this City as to their queen, if my desire be not granted? The Tree in the Court of the Fountain is still withered and barren. When shall I see a sign that it will ever be otherwise?” “Turn your face from the green world, and look where all seems barren and cold!” said Gandalf. Then Aragorn turned, and there was a stony slope behind him running down from the skirts of the snow; and as he looked he was aware that alone there in the waste a growing thing stood. And he climbed to it, and saw that out of the very edge of the snow there sprang a sapling tree no more than three foot high. Already it had put forth young leaves long and shapely, dark above and silver underneath, and upon its slender crown it bore one small cluster of flowers whose white petals shone like the sunlit snow. Then Aragorn cried: “Ye! utuvienyes! I have found it! Lo! here is a scion of the Eldest of Trees! But how comes it here? For it is not itself yet seven years old.” And Gandalf coming looked at it, and said: “Verily this is a sapling of the line of Nimloth the fair; and that was a seedling of Galathilion, and

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that a fruit of Telperion of many names, Eldest of Trees. Who shall say how it comes here in the appointed hour? But this is an ancient hallow, and ere the kings failed or the Tree withered in the court, a fruit must have been set here. For it is said that, though the fruit of the Tree comes seldom to ripeness, yet the life within may then lie sleeping through many long years, and none can foretell the time in which it will awaken. Remem­ ber this. For if ever a fruit ripens, it should be planted, lest the line die out of the world. Here it has lain hidden on the mountain, even as the race of Elendil lay hidden in the wastes of the North. Yet the line of Nimloth is older far than your line, King Elessar.” Then Aragom laid his hand gently to the sapling, and lo! it seemed to hold only lightly to the earth, and it was removed without hurt; and Aragom bore it back to the Citadel. Then the withered tree was uprooted, but with reverence, and they did not bum it, but laid it to rest in the silence of Rath Dinen. And Aragom planted the new tree in the court by the fountain, and swiftly and gladly it began to grow; and when the month of June entered in it was laden with blossom. "The sign has been given,” said Aragom, "and the day is not far off.” And he set watchmen upon the walls. (Ill, 307-309) On the personal level, the sign points to the consummation of Aragom’s love for Arwen Evenstar, the third great union of elves and men. Most of their story is relegated to an appendix, as if Tolkien wanted to make us realize how much the hero must labor in dark places without any clear or constant vision of success. Although momentary pledges kindle and rekindle his dedication, Strider s er­ rantry remains lonely. Now, at last, after Saurons defeat, he is on the verge of personal fulfillment. His marriage is near at hand. But he asks about it indirectly, with a certain shyness, for the elf prin­ cess is high above him still, a priceless gift from her father, Elrond. He asks with that self-abnegation which in fact makes him worthy of Arwen. He does not ask, even inwardly, “What do I get out of all these labors?” but rather, “How shall the Kingdom be renewed?” The sapling of the White Tree thus holds a double promise for Aragom: that Arwen Evenstar will be given to him, and that through their union the line of the Numenorean kings will be re­ newed. It is interesting to find the same double promise in Homer s Odyssey, composed some 2,600 years before Tolkien was bom. All through Odysseus’s wanderings, trees mark the way that natural en­ durance and divine favor sustain human life and the human spirit. Thus Odysseus clung to a fig tree over Charybdis’s whirlpool of

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death, and he was restored to life and strength on Phaeacia and to home and selfhood on Ithaca, beneath the shade of olive trees. At last, after killing the suitors, Odysseus is beautifully tested in Book 23 by Penelope. Their private recognition sign is the trunk of the olive tree around which Odysseus had constructed their marriage bed—the green, flourishing relationship of personal intimacy and happiness to which, after so long a separation, they may at last re­ turn. And again, in Book 24, Odysseus chooses to reveal himself to his old, exhausted father, Laertes, through the sign of trees—this time, by enumerating the various fruit trees Laertes presented to him when he was a boy. Homer was not, of course, consciously using symbolism. But he must have felt the rightness of these signs, the appropriateness of the olive and fruit trees both to the continuity, just barely achieved, of the royal family and to the renewal of Ithaca through the return of the king. One reason, I think, for the great pleasure we feel in reading and rereading the Odyssey is the skill with which Homer presents the process of growth and continuity to our imagination. Telemachus exemplifies right and natural growth— what the Greeks called physis. Odysseus ventures into realms of peril and death and what Tollden would call faerie , but he also returns and is reintegrated into domestic and communal life: he can go home again, and (despite Dante and Tennyson and Kazantzakis) he is meant ultimately to stay there and rest content. More importantly, we have the feeling that, despite disorderly interruptions and be­ yond the death of individuals, life will continue like the olive and fruit trees, will go on—if I may be allowed the pun—in its old familiar way. Tolkien is less reassuring. His story recalls Homer’s tragic Iliad as well as the ultimately comic Odyssey. He knows and insistently evokes the power of time to ravish beauty, undo man s works, and carry into memory and song (or the Far West) all that we cherish and fight for in our brief lives. How can you live in England, he seems to say, and not be moved by old stones and roads, old lines of fortification, and green burial mounds? Civilization is a constant up­ hill struggle against decay and death, and the heroes who maintain civilization must lie eventually under green mounds for later men knowingly or unknowingly to walk upon. The beauty we love gives meaning to our acts; yet much loveliness has passed away and is

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even now passing. Although Galadriel’s enchantment holds change at bay, although the woods of Lothlorien maintain a summertime elsewhere vanished from Middle-earth, still the healing and sustain­ ing power of the Three Rings wielded by Elrond, Galadriel, and Gandalf must gradually wane—as their holders know—once the One Ring of Sauron is destroyed. Hence their shadowed victory, bringing the Third Age to its end and ushering in the impoverished Age of Men. Hence, too, the difficulty of their heroic choices to cast away voluntarily what they hold most precious. Only up to a point, then, can we define heroism in Tolkien as the fight to preserve what is good, green, and beautiful against pollu­ tion. Of course, this matters enormously. It is no coincidence that Gandalf, the only wizard (as Treebeard puts it) who really cares about trees, is set against Saruman who, his mind filled with cogs and wheels, wantonly hews trees down. It is the familiar tale of the dark Satanic mills. Or again, the failures of Denethor and Boromir are set against the definition of right heroism given by Faramir: "For myself,” said Faramir, "I would see the White Tree in flower again in the courts of the kings, and the Silver Crown return, and Minas Tirith in peace. . . . War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Numenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise.” (II, 355) Only this rootedness, this steward’s commitment to the preservation of loveliness, can protect us against the overmastering temptation of power represented by the One Ring. It helps to have roots in the Shire, as all the hobbits do. It helps to be a gardener like Sam. Fara­ mir himself, last of the stewards, will find fulfillment as princegardener of Ithilien, and the warrior-maid fiowyn will join him there, relinquishing other dreams of glory. Personal healing and cul­ tivation of the land go together. Back in the Shire, where another Tree of Promise blossoms after the war, Sam will found the house of Gardner and be elected (and re-elected) mayor—a humble heroism, Tolkien intimates, but the kind that really works. And yet, paradoxically, the unconditional drive to preserve and

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maintain loveliness is self-defeating. If we cling to the past or the present as it becomes past, we may lose everything. Any too narrow patriotism, like Boromir s love of Gondor,2 any finite loyalty, like pre­ serving Lothlorien or the Third Age itself—these things play into the Enemy’s hands. And each one of us has to choose. Galadriel and the elves must choose mortality or else exile, to wane in Middle-earth or depart into the West. In no event will things remain the same. And Frodo’s choice, though more cumulative and less conscious and dra­ matic, stands for all the other choices and yet outruns them in the pulling up of roots. For Frodo, much more than Aragom, becomes a displaced person, an exile, suffering pain so deep that he cannot “go home again.” The Shire will never be the same for him, because he is no longer the same; he is too deeply wounded. And finally he too must pass into the dim West. Nor is it enough to break with our deepest roots in the heroic ef­ fort to preserve what can be preserved: we knew, after all, that selfsacrifice and death have always been the essence of heroism. What is still harder to accept is that for all the cost—and it is heavy—there is no guarantee of final success in the battle against evil. A battle may be won, but never the war. Sauron is defeated; others, perhaps mightier, will come. All that we can do, all that we are called to do (to paraphrase Gandalf), is to clear the fields for our own time, pro­ viding a measure of clean earth for our successors to till. More gar­ dening; how simple it sounds! Yet this simple effort requires not only all the traditional heroic virtues of courage, perseverance, and selfsacrifice, but also a redirection, a facing into the future, hence enor­ mous faith. We cannot envision final success; we cannot see for sure that our efforts will be rewarded—or even that we are doing the right thing. But there are signs from time to time that somehow hold out encouragement. One of these signs is the White Tree. As I said earlier, the sapling revealed to Aragom is a pledge both of his personal fulfillment and of the continuity of the Numenorean tradition in Gondor, albeit 2 It would be interesting, though beyond the scope of this paper, to compare heroic, passionate, shortsighted, and irresponsible Boromir to Tumus. Oldfashioned heroism is attractive and admirable in many ways, yet inadequate to the present need, hence, actually dangerous. Similarly, fiowyn before her heal­ ing may be compared to Camilla, the passionate, untamed warrior-maiden.

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these in turn—the marriage with Arwen, the succession of rulers into the Fourth Age, an age of men—are tinged with pain and un­ certainty. Yet the sapling offers what is almost assurance. For the lineage of the Tree (as Gandalf points out) is very old indeed. It has been preserved in Gondor, in part miraculously, in part (the ethical implication is obvious) by human care and foresight. Earlier, a seedling was brought from Numenor that foundered, and still earlier, from Eressea (or Elvenhome), and even before that, from the mysterious home of the Valar in the farthest West. Of the two paradisal Trees that grew there, the Golden and the Silver, neither survived; both were poisoned by Morgoth. Yet the trees’ light was caught in the three great jewels, or Silmarilli, two of which are lost, and one of which is borne by Earendil the Mariner to shine in the heavens as a star. This is the same star whose light, caught in Galadriel’s mirror-pool, is presented to Frodo in a phial that can shine in almost the very darkest places. And again, the fifth seedling in the line of Telperion, the Silver Tree, is even now replanted by Aragom to flourish in the court of the kings in Minas Tirith. The White Tree is therefore more than a mere emblem of kingship. It is what kingship is all about: the continuity of beauty, wisdom, and nurture from the oldest times. We can go further. I used the word paradisal intentionally, for Tolkien was probably influenced in part by the complex Hebrew-Christian tradition of the seeds or the twig taken from Paradise by Seth or others after the Fall.3 The point is not that we can hold onto the happiness and glory of a lost paradise. Any such attempt would probably bring disaster. Yet the vision of the Tree helps us to feel, as Aragom must, that loveliness is never altogether lost, that rather (I find this note quite Pindaric) it will go underground for a while to be renewed in due season. Discon­ tinuity is apparent but never final. 3 Professor Siegfried Wenzel kindly referred me to E. C. Quinn, The Quest of Seth for the Oil of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Be­ hind many versions of the legend, Quinn finds “the desire of man to possess a relic from the Garden of Eden, where he formerly lived in harmony with God” (p. 93). Consider the plucking of a twig, an act so common in primitive ritual, as a magical talisman, or as a means of obtaining the indwelling spirit. For var­ ious other mythic and symbolic meanings, see the chapter on vegetation in M. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. R. Sheed (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1963), pp. 265-330.

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In the account of the fall of Troy that Aeneas gives to the sympa­ thetic, affectionate Dido, he compares the city’s destruction to an ash tree4 that is cut down on the mountains ( II, 624-631): Turn vero omne mihi visum considere in ignis Ilium et ex imo verti Neptunia Troia: ac veluti summis antiquam in montibus omum cum ferro accisam crebrisque bipennibus instant eruere agricolae certatim, ilia usque minatur et tremefacta comam concusso vertice nutat, vulneribus donee paulatim evicta supremum congemuit traxitque iugis avulsa ruinam. 4 Virgil’s simile will be understood better if seen in relation to Homeric ante­ cedents, to a passage in the Georgies, and to the whole context of Book II. (a) Homer twice uses tree-similes when describing the fall of men in battle (notice already how Virgil moves from the personal event to the larger event, the death of the city). In Iliad 4.482-487, Simoeisios falls at Ajax’s hands, like a poplar that grew smooth and high, which a carpenter cuts down to make a rim for the wheel of a beautiful chariot; the tree falls and lies by a river bank. (There is less precise observation here than in Virgil's tree-similes, less empathy as the tree is felled, more stress on the positive result, what is done with the timber.) Again, in Iliad 13.389-391, Asios is killed by Idomeneus: he falls like an oak or white poplar or tall pine that carpenters cut down with their axes for shipbuilding timber. Again, there is no empathy; the stress is on the result, the product. Homer's similes tend generally to help us accept the death of men in battle as natural, ordinary events. Virgil’s simile, applied to the city, is more painful, makes the event (as it was for Aeneas) more difficult to accept. (b) The following lines from the Georgies, 2.207-211, shed a different light on the passage from die Aeneid: aut unde iratus silvam devexit arator et nemora evertit multos ignava per annos, antiquasque domos avium cum stirpibus imis eruit; illae altum nidis petiere relictis, at rudis enituit impulso vomere campus. There is pain and loss here; the birds lose their homes, their nests. Yet Virgil stresses that the woods are being cleared for a creative purpose, to make good rich farmland. On balance, the operation seems right; Virgil directs our attention (rather like Homer) to the result, the shining furrows of the new field. See L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgies of Virgil (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1969), pp. 130-131, on Virgil's realism: “No tears must be shed.” In the same way, Virgil could have stressed creative divine purpose in the Aeneid simile. (Note that in Georgies 2.111 he speaks of steriles saxosis montibus omi, ash trees on the mountains that may as well be cut down because they are unproductive.) Yet he omits any sense of creative purpose and emphasizes the pain and loss. Here, certainly, tears will be shed.

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[Then indeed I saw that all Ilium was subsiding Into the flames, and Neptune’s Troy quite overthrown. Imagine a veteran ash-tree upon some mountain top, When woodsmen are working to fell it, with blow upon blow of their axes Vigorously hacking: the tree seems always about to fall; It nods, and the topmost leaves are shivered by each concussion: Little by little their blows master it, till at last with a great groan it snaps off and falls full length on the hillside.] Here we have poetry. Sound and sense, word choice and word order, and rhythmical patterning make the act present to our senses. Not only do we perceive how the tree is shaken, totters, and at last falls; but also this natural occurrence is rendered empathetically, indeed likened in a new, this time implicit, comparison to the killing of a man in battle. The tree “threatens” the enemy at first, but then “is made to tremble,” is quite ‘ overcome by the wounds,” and “gives the final groan.” The passage probably derives a certain power from the primitive belief in tree spirits who are hurt or killed when their trees are cut down. We know from Virgil’s earlier poetry, the Eclogues and Georgies, how much he knew and cared about trees, from the discipline of the earliest planting and nurture to the contemplation of their splendid variety and the enjoyment of rest beneath their shade ( the latter becoming a metaphor for the conditions that make poetic creativity possible). The more fully we imagine and are moved by the fall of the great tree, the better we shall grasp what Virgil is telling us. First, he wants us to see that history always in­ volves suffering. The creation of the new requires the destruction of the old in a cosmic balance, or isonomia. Thus, Troy must fall—and Carthage, and primitive Italy—so that Rome may rise and fulfill her destiny. Second, Virgil tells us that this suffering and loss necessi­ tated by the movement of history not only is perceived by human beings, like Aeneas (or Dido), but also enforces a corresponding movement within their souls. Thus the key words, eruere and evel(c) Images and metaphors of tearing and breaking down, falling, rending, and overturning (with forms of ruo, vello, verto) recur throughout Book II. For anticipations of Palinurus and the Golden Bough and some verbal connec­ tions between the tree’s fall and the destruction of Troy, including Priam’s death, see M. C. J. Putnam, The Poetry of the Aeneid (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 37-39.

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lere, to ‘ uproot” and to “tear out” (along with verti, “to overturn” ), not only describe the external actions constituting the fall of Troy and link them to one another, but also indicate the latent process of uprooting that is going on within Aeneas’s soul and that will be further developed in the book of his exile and wanderings, which follows. Virgil’s simile comparing the ash tree to Troy has a third aspect. For all its emotion, it provides a detached view of historical process for us, for the poet, and even for Aeneas himself, whose eyes were opened by his goddess-mother to the divine realities underlying the cataclysm of Troy. Although our present grief, our sense of loss and desolation, is subjectively right, it is yet no adequate index to the final meaning of things. It may even be that the axe-wielding farm­ ers cut down the ash tree for some creative purpose. That would be reassuring. But what can we make of the earlier simile where fire and flood engulf the fields, destroying crops and trees together? And what about all those other passages in Book II describing the willful savagery of gods as well as men? The suffering is clear; much less so, the underlying meaning. Now it would be unjust to Virgil—an overreaction to earlier opti­ mistic interpretations of the Aeneid—to exaggerate the elements of suffering and desolation in that poem. For Virgil maintains a con­ stant balance between light and dark, loss and accomplishment, death and renewal; even in the darkness of Book II signs of hope appear, signs of the promise of the future. It seems right, however, to spotlight the theme of uprooting, partly because it connects outer loss with inner desolation, but still more because uprooting is an essential feature of heroism as Virgil interprets it. The exile and wanderings of Aeneas in Book III bring out the latent meanings of uprooting. In that book, he is forced again and again to pluck up roots, to “desert” each apparent resting place. The word deserere implies unsowing, hence, uprooting.5 Aeneas and his Trojan follow­ 5 The opening lines of Book III restate the theme of Troy’s fall and introduce the new major theme of personal exile and uprootedness (1-5, 10-12): Postquam res Asiae Priamique evertere gentem immeritam visum superis, ceciditque superbum Ilium et omnis humo fumat Neptunia Troia, diversa exsilia et desertas quaerere terras auguriis agimur divum,.. .

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ers are like seed that must not be sown prematurely but saved for its rightful destination, the fields of Italy. At the same time, the re­ current metaphor recalls the inward uprooting that Aeneas, far more than his less sensitive followers, must constantly suffer. Hence, I think, the prominence given by Virgil to the nightmarish Thracian episode in which Aeneas tries unsuccessfully to pull up shrubbery to cover the altars with foliage and meets finally with a dire portent

(111, 22- 29): forte fuit iuxta tumulus, quo cornea summo virgulta et densis hastilibus hórrida myrtus. accessi viridemque ab humo conveliere silvam conatus, ramis tegerem ut frondentibus aras, horrendum et dictu video mirabile monstrum. nam quae prima solo ruptis radicibus arbos vellitur, huic atro liquuntur sanguine guttae et terram tabo maculant. . . [There was a dune nearby, as it chanced, topped by brushwood Of cornel and of myrtle sprouted with thickset shafts. I approached it, wanting some foliage to festoon over the altar, And tried to root up its dense greenery: as I did so I saw an uncanny thing, which horrifies me to speak of. From the first sapling that I tore up, its roots dissevered, there oozed out, drop by drop, a flow of black blood Fouling the earth with its stains.] What does this mean? Not just, I think, that Aeneas must move on, must leave behind the realms of Trojan suffering, of guilt and bloodlitora cum patriae lacrimans portusque relinquo et campos ubi Troia fuit. feror exsul in altum cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis. Kenneth Quinn, Virgil’s Aeneid: A Critical Description (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 126, comments on Virgil’s (false etymological) connec­ tion of exsul with ex solum, “a man without a land” (soil); cf. Servius, quasi trans solum missus, aut extra solum vagus (III, 8 ). I am arguing for a similar play on desertus. Sero and its compounds occur frequently in the Georgies; now Aeneas is “un-sown” or uprooted. Cf. already deserta (of Creusa) in Book II, 562, deseruere (of Aeneas) in 565, deseruit (of Creusa leaving Aeneas) in 791. The metaphor recurs frequently in Book III: see lines 4, 122, 617-618, 646-647, and especially 190-191, and 710-711. In sum, deserere is a key metaphor, link­ ing the fall of Troy in Book II with the exile and wanderings of Aeneas in Book III. The theme of uprooting gains further meanings from Eclogues I and IX and probably from VirgiFs personal experience of losing his father’s farm.

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shed (Priam’s son, Polydorus, murdered by a treacherous ally). It is true that Aeneas must leave the doomed city behind and must also —as he gradually learns—leave behind the wrong purpose of simply ‘ rebuilding Troy” in some foreign land. But surely the portent also describes the inner torment of learning such a lesson. To pull up roots, time after time, is to shed heart’s blood. It is agony—no less so because Aeneas, good leader of men, keeps a stiff upper lip, en­ courages his men, and does quickly without apparent reluctance what has to be done. It is this uprooted hero whom Dido has welcomed at Carthage to her home and heart. Aeneas’s long story, the flashback of Books II and III, shows why the hero succumbed so easily to the warmth, human affection, and heart’s ease that welcomed him at Carthage; but Dido, if she had really listened to that story, would have been forewarned that Aeneas must eventually pull up roots from Car­ thage just as he did from Troy and Thrace and Crete. This is pre­ cisely what follows: Dido and her shore are deserted by Aeneas.6 In a nightmare that describes her inner state, the queen wanders “in a deserted land” where she can no longer locate her Tyrian people. The tragic irony is that Aeneas, the uprooted hero, has become a carrier of uprootedness and destruction to others; fate is very cruel. Significantly, Virgil portrays Aeneas’s state by another great tree simile7 as Dido’s sister, Anna, brings him her latest passionate ap­ peals (IV, 437-449): 6 Dido’s kingdom borders on an actual desert, as her sister Anna remarks in her seductive plea (42, deserta siti regio). In 143-145, Aeneas is significantly compared to Apollo as he deserts Lycia and the streams of Xanthus in winter; in 323 Aeneas is deserting Dido; see also 330, 582, and 677 (Anna now desert­ ed by Dido’s death). In Dido’s nightmare of 465-473, the deserted landscape (468, Tyrios deserta quaerere terra) corresponds to her psychological state. 7 The strength of the oak tree was explained in Georgies II, 290-297, in terms of its deep-rootedness. The passage, which Virgil is clearly drawing on, was in­ fluenced (cf. Friedrich Klingner, Virgil [Zurich and Stuttgart: Artemis Verlag, 1967], pp. 250-251) by passages from the Iliad, especially one comparing stal­ wart warriors to oak trees that sustain blasts of wind and rain as they grow on the mountain (Iliad 12, 132-136). In contrast with Homer, Virgil emphasizes the negative, the pressure of emotions on Aeneas and his pain, as well as his endurance. The last three words, lacrirme volvuntur inanes, have been much discussed. With Serv. Danielis ( “lacrimae Aeneas vel Didonis vel Annae vel omnium1), I believe that Virgil is intentionally ambiguous; yet the stress is clearly on

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Talibus orabat, talisque miserrima fletus fertque refertque soror. sed nullis ille movetur fletibus aut voces ullas tractabilis audit; fata obstant placidasque viri deus obstruit auris. ac velut annoso validam cum robore quercum Alpini Boreae nunc hinc nunc flatibus illinc eruere inter se certant; it stridor, et altae constemunt terram concusso stipite frondes; ipsa haeret scopulis et quantum vertice ad auras aetherias, tantum radice in Tartara tendit: haud secus adsiduis hinc atque hinc vocibus heros tunditur, et magno persentit pectore curas; mens immota manet, lacrimae volvuntur inanes. [Such were her prayers, and such the tearful entreaties her agonised Sister conveyed to Aeneas again and again. But unmoved by Tearful entreaties he was, adamant against all pleadings: Fate blocked them, heaven stopped his ears lest he turn complaisant. As when some stalwart oak-tree, some veteran of the Alps, Is assailed by a wintry wind whose veering gusts tear at it, Trying to root it up; wildly whistle the branches, The leaves come flocking down from aloft as the bole is battered; But the tree stands firm on its crag, for high as its head is carried Into the sky, so deep do its roots go down towards Hades: Even thus was the hero belaboured for long with every kind of Pleading, and his great heart thrilled through and through with the pain of it; Resolute, though, was his mind; unavailingly rolled her tears (lit: the tears).] Virgil means for us to recall and contrast the simile of Book II with this simile. The ash tree fell from the blows of the farmers’ axes; the oak, shaken by blasts of wind, still stands. Aeneas has achieved a heroic steadfastness of will that can be described in terms of deep­ rootedness. This is doubly ironic because he developed that strength (and is even now developing it) through much painful uprooting, of himself and others, and because the oak tree stands firm and tall while its roots reach down toward Hell—which is exactly what Ae­ neas must be feeling like. His dying, to himself and to others, makes Aeneas’s feelings. Contrast Odysseus’s greater self-control in Odyssey 19.210212.

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him the powerful instrument that destiny requires. It also antici­ pates his experience of death in Book VI, his transition through the underworld and his initiation into the Roman future. But the simile tells us more. The blasts of wind must refer to the passionate ap­ peals of Anna and (through her) Dido. And the falling leaves? If they correspond to the “tears falling to no purpose,” then these tears must be, not just Anna’s or Dido’s—the ambiguity is quite inclusive —but also the tears of Aeneas. They are empty; they accomplish nothing. But they show Aeneas’s helpless compassion as he joins in Dido’s grief but cannot help her. Finally, the falling leaves suggest an irreconcilable conflict between what destiny requires and the human material it is using. What is wanted is naked will; that is why Aeneas must be stripped of every ordinary feeling and ordinary relationship, as a great tree is stripped of leaves in autumn. Yet Ae­ neas has remained, and will yet remain, a human being. His tears, though unavailing, pay tribute to the inherent sadness of human life, which cannot, like the oak tree, renew itself and put forth new leaves in season, and yet which feels to the end the painfulness of loss and death. It is a living agony to act and move forward like a hero. After Aeneas leaves Carthage, after he is rested and renewed in Sicily, we come (it seems inevitably) to Book VI and the Golden Bough. Much has been said of that mysterious talisman by whose aid the hero passes alive through the underworld in search of his father and further instruction.8 Clearly, the Bough, like Venus's doves that guide Aeneas to it, belongs to the realm of fairy tales. And clearly, too, it is more than instrumental. Its manifold qualities —the lifeless, metallic gold against the living forest green, the light shining in darkness, the resemblance to the parasitic mistletoe with its inherent power of self-renewal in mid-winter—point beyond it to the mystery of reality as Aeneas experiences it and Virgil per­ ceives it. This mystery encompasses the interpenetration of life and death; the balance of individual sacrifice and loss, on the one hand, 8 For two very thoughtful treatments of the bough, as well as much bibliog­ raphy, see R. A. Brooks, “Discolor Aura,” AJP 74 ( 1953): 260-280, and C. P. Segal, “Aetemum Per Saecula Nomen, the Golden Bough and the Tragedy of History,” Arion 1 (1965): 617-657, and Arion 2 (1966): 34-72.1 have discussed the bough briefly because these authors have already covered the material very thoroughly; nevertheless, it remains a crucial image for the Aeneid.

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and historical achievement and fame, on the other; and perhaps an unresolved tension between order and meaning, as the philosopher or theologian comprehends them, and a more primitive human un­ certainty deeply set in the universe itself. These meanings and more emanate from the Bough like ripples spreading over a pond. Amid so many possibilities, I want to dwell, and only briefly, on Aeneass experience when he plucks the Bough ( VI, 210-211): corripit Aeneas extemplo avidusque refringit cunctantem, et vatis portat sub tecta Sibyllae. [Aeneas at once took hold of the bough, and eagerly breaking It off with one pull (lit: though it hesitated), he bore it into the shrine of the Sibyl.] Aeneas succeeds. He is the chosen hero ( one thinks of Arthur and the Sword in the Stone). Yet here again, as in Thrace, something has gone wrong. Aeneas was told that the Bough would follow ef­ fortlessly when the fated hero appeared, but in his actual experi­ ence it hesitates and must be forced. What does this mean? It may imply an irrational factor in history: the resistance to fate embodied in Juno and her satellites, which causes unnecessary suffering throughout the Aeneid. But may it not also imply a corresponding resistance in the hero himself? Aeneas follows destiny and makes himself its instrument as a good Stoic should. But not entirely. For he is a creature of flesh and blood, not metal, and as long as there is life, there must be a certain human resistance to what must be. It is true that the Odyssean ad­ ventures and achievements of Books I-VI, which are played out on a spiritual level, culminate in a mystical experience by which the hero is not only instructed but also reborn. He is directed toward the future; he is confirmed in purpose and will remain so to the end. Yet he will also continue to feel—what? Not only has he re-enacted Odysseus’s journey without the personal satisfaction that should come at the end—the sign of the fruit trees; but also he has carried with him and must re-experience in Italy the tragedy of the Iliad: the horror of war, the loss of friends, and, more inwardly, the Achillean tragedy of achievement and suffering intimately joined. Aeneas’s wielding of the Golden Bough was a heroic privilege bought at enormous cost to himself and others. In the second half of the Aeneid other images of tree, branch, and stump restate the two-

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sidedness of the heroic experience and of the reality that the hero attempts to grasp and that, somehow, resists grasping. From the ambiguities of the Golden Bough we turn, with some relief, to what seems a better and happier world uncontaminated by suffering, more specifically, to the description of a laurel tree growing in the midst of Latinus’s palace (VII, 59-67): laurus erat tecti medio in penetralibus altis sacra comam multosque metu servata per annos, quam pater inventam, primas cum conderet arces, ipse ferebatur Phoebo sacrasse Latinus, Laurentisque ab ea nomen posuisse colonis. huius apes summum densae (mirabile dictu) stridore ingenti liquidum trans aethera vectae obsedere apicem, et pedibus per mutua nexis examen subitum ramo frondente pependit. [There grew in the central court of the palace a laurel tree, Its leafage holy and held in reverence for many years, Which king Latinus was said to have found there, when he first Established the city, and dedicated the tree to Phoebus, Using its name to christen his colonists the Laurentes. A strange thing happened now: a tight-packed swarm of bees Came loudly humming through the limpid air, and settling Upon the top of that tree, they interlocked their feet; Next moment a swarm was hanging down from the green bough.] Like Laertes’ fruit trees in the Odyssey and like the White Tree of Gondor with which we began, this laurel represents continuity and fulfillment. It has deep roots in the Latin past; it was there before the city was founded. It is sacred to Phoebus, the shining young god who grants success (and who will be Augustus’s patron divinity). The name “Laurentians” suggests that these people will be a fa­ vored stock, a pastoral people. Then the swarming of bees, which signifies the coming of foreigners to intermarry with the Latins and fructify their future, gives further promise. The omen thus looks to the future Rome, a Rome built over the centuries on strong alliances and blood ties. At the same time, it prophesies the advent of a higher spiritual order, also Roman, which will exist in harmony with nature and nature’s gifts—the spreading laurel tree.

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It seems almost cruel to point out that this lovely passage has tragic connotations. The laurel tree in the midst of Latinus’s palace recalls another, the Trojan laurel overhanging the altar at which old king Priam is butchered; and the swarm of bees recalls those other happy bees to which Dido’s once prospering Carthaginian subjects were compared. These echoes, still rather faint, belong to a perva­ sive leitmotif of the first third of Book VII, which links Latium with Troy and Carthage and suggests its vulnerability to suffering—a point that the following books, indeed the following episodes of Book VII, will confirm. Significantly, too, the portent of the bees is followed by another, a devouring flame on the head of the princess Lavinia, a flame that symbolizes personal suffering and loss in con­ junction with historic fame—by now a very familiar ambiguity. And yet, it would be wrong to exaggerate the latent tragic side of the picture. Bloodshed and passion are certainly coming, and the trage­ dies of Troy and Carthage will be re-enacted in Latium; yet the laurel tree looks forward also to continuity and fulfillment on the other side of history. This is what Aeneas is fighting for. He will not be rewarded like Odysseus; nothing like the spreading laurel tree will be found at the end of the Aeneid. Yet we must allow him to live (if only for a little time) in the idyllic beauty by which even self-negating heroism must occasionally be nurtured. Anticipated in Book VII, this moment of rest and happiness comes to Aeneas in Book VIII in a mysterious journey up the Tiber to the source of Rome. It will be, for him, the very last chance. Aeneas has been an exile ( exsul). A poetic play on words, here, as in desertus, suggests that he has been uprooted “from the soil.” But there is also a hint that he is welcomed like a seed to the soil of Italy and will be replanted and rerooted there (VIII, 36-39): “O sate gente deum, Troianam ex hostibus urbem qui revehis nobis aetemaque Pergama servas, exspectate solo Laurenti arvisque Latinis, hie tibi certa domus, certi (ne absiste) penates . . .” [O prince of divine lineage, who out of the enemy’s clutches Bring Troy town back to us, preserving it for all time; O long-awaited in the Laurentine land, in Latium, Here your appointed home is, the resting place for your gods.]

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From one perspective, his arrival in Italy can be seen as a kind of homecoming—paradoxically, a recurrent Odyssean motif in the sec­ ond, “Iliadic” half of the Aeneid. From another, more tragic, view, Aeneas’s coming will be seen as an invasion of Golden Age Italy, which disrupts an earlier innocence and beauty and plunges coun­ trymen into war. Instead of being cast in the role of Odysseus, he will be cast against his will in the role of Paris and ultimately in the role of Achilles. Yet in the momentary idyllic vision, all this tragedy and suffering participates in a larger historical cycle, which should end, as it began, in the peace and harmony of a Golden Age (VIII, 313-327): Turn rex Evandrus Romanae eonditor arcis: “haec nemora indigenae Fauni Nymphaeque tenebant gensque virum truncis et duro robore nata, quis neque mos neque cultus erat, nee iungere tauros aut componere opes norant aut parcere parto, sed rami atque asper victu venatus alebat. primus ab aetherio venit Satumus Olympo arma Iovis fugiens et regnis exsul ademptis. is genus indocile ac dispersum montibus altis composuit legesque dedit, Latiumque vocari maluit, his quoniam latuisset tutus in oris. aurea quae perhibent illo sub rege fuere saecula: sic placida populos in pace regebat, deterior donee paulatim ac decolor aetas et belli rabies et amor successit habendi.. [Then king Evander, the founder of Rome’s citadel, said:— These woods were once the home of indigenous fauns and nymphs, And of men who had sprung from hard-wood oaks, who had no settled Way of life, no civilization: ploughing, the forming of Communal reserves, and economy were unknown then. They lived on the produce of trees and the hard-won fare of the hunter. The first thing was that Saturn came hither from Olympus, An exile deprived of his kingdom, fleeing the power of Jove. He made a united nation of this intractable folk Scattered among the hills, gave laws to them, chose the name of Latium—a word suggesting the safe refuge he had found here. His reign was the period called in legend the Golden Age, So peacefully serene were the lives of his subjects. It lasted Till, little by little, the time grew tarnished, an age of baser Metal came in, of mad aggression and love for gain . . . ]

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This is no longer the farmer’s daydream of a preagricultural time when the earth gave effortless ease and bounty to mankind.9 Saturn is the Italic god of sowing; to a primitive people who lacked culti­ vation he bought the arts of agriculture and law. What we have here, then, is an idealized and very Roman union of happiness and discipline, nature and law—or more poetically, green and gold. The ideal is only temporary. The age declines; avarice and war spring up like weeds and the old savagery with them, until new heroes and new kings re-establish the civilized order of Saturn. First Heracles overcomes the monster Cacus; then Evander establishes an Arca­ dian reign in Italy. And we must add ( since Latinus cannot control the latent passions and innate savagery of his realm), it will now be Aeneas’s turn to fight, to conquer, and—very briefly—to rule. The groves of Italy, the green places of the spirit, prepare Aeneas for his coming task; they are, cruelly, a foil to the bloodshed and desolation of the coming books. They promise meaning and order even beyond suffering—a promise, to be sure, that will scarcely seem real or valid in the midst of that suffering. All these meanings are foreshadowed and combined in numerous passages of Book VIII. I only want to mention a verse that I find especially haunting. In it Venus brings the fated arms to Aeneas (VIII, 616): "arma sub adversa posuit radiantia quercu” [The radiant arms she had propped up against an oak, before him]. The juxtaposed colors and meanings are curiously harmonized, as they are in the symbol of the Golden Bough. The arms seem alien to the landscape, and Aeneas is being wrenched from his beautiful, shaded retreat; yet the whole pull of Book VIII is toward a further reconciliation of desire and purpose, nature and law, even love and war (but war, we add hast­

9 Note the paradox that Saturnus, god of sowing, who is a bearer of civiliza­ tion, is depicted here as an exile, like Evander and Aeneas after him (cf. Klingner, Virgil, p. 534). This is no longer the soft Golden Age of Saturn that, accord­ ing to Georgies I, 121-146, Jupiter dispelled in order to sharpen men’s wits and create civilization; this period has more in common with the Golden Age of Georgies II and its amalgam of hard work, simplicity, piety, and joy—the Golden Age to whose revival the Aeneid looks forward. By one view, Aeneas and the Trojans shatter the idyllic peace of primitive Italy (see especially VII, 45-49, 202-204); by another view, Aeneas brings law and order to a nation that is essentially, though at first covertly, savage, whose representatives are Mezentius, Camilla, and Tumus, and where Latinus cannot keep control of

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ily, for the sake of peace).10 It is all perhaps an impossible dream, but we drink deep of it and are re-created, like Aeneas, before re­ turning to the war. For in Aeneid IX-XII we are back (it almost seems) where we started, in a world of tragic passions, resistance to fate, spiritual up­ rooting, and desolation.11 Italy is laid waste like Troy; echoes of the civil wars of Virgil’s century suggest a still greater futility and sad­ ness. Already in Book VII plowshares were beaten back into swords; a metallic crop sprang up from the same soil that welcomed the exiled Aeneas. Now widespread destruction ensues. Imagery of tree and shrub reflects the central theme of desola­ tion. The one great forest in Book IX is dark, tangled, and hostile: Euryalus loses his way there, and his life. Later, in Book X, the maneuvering of Pallas’s soldiers is compared to the conjunction of brushfires set in the woods, presumably to clear land for cultiva­ tion.12 Pallas watches the spectacle with naive aesthetic enjoyment. things. As ever, the sense of right accomplishment is balanced by an equal sense of loss and sadness. 10 The ambiguous nature of Book VIII owes much to overlapping structural patterns in the Aeneid, patterns that many scholars have variously explored; thus it stands in a special relation to Books II, VI, VII, and IX. 11 The deserere motif recurs, more significantly now after mention of Saturn and sowing: cf. VII, 291 (desemisse rates), 394 ( deseruere domes), and 405 (Amata drives the mothers inter deserta ferarum). The culminating image of Allecto uprooting Italy (543, deserit Hesperiam) should be seen in close con­ junction with the perverse sowing of a crop of armed men: cf. 339 ( sere crimina belli), 526 (horrescit strictis seges ensibus), and 551 (spargam arma per agros); hence the “flowering of warriors” (643-644, 804) is less happy than beautiful. Virgil recalls (a) the evocation in Georgies I of the sorrow of the civil wars in Italy, which wasted the land, removed the farmers, and left weapons of dead warriors to be ploughed up in later times; (b) possibly the contrast in Georgies II, 140-142, of the happy fertility of Italy to the sowing (in mythologi­ cal Greece) of dragon seed from which armed men sprang up; and (e) the Thracian episode of Aeneid III (see above, note 5). 12 Contrast this with the forest fire in Georgies II, 303-314, where the fire itself is seen as victor. The aesthetic pleasure of Pallas (cf. Georgies II, 274275, where ranked vines are compared to the deployment of a legion under arms) is misleading. War, like fire, easily gets out of control; cf. XII, 451-454 and 521-525. The farmer, to be sure, should bum sterilis agros (Georgies I, 84-93), but no such purposefulness can be seen in the great disasters of flood or fire (316-334, influencing Aeneid II, 304-308); indeed, the Po in flood was a horrible portent accompanying and corresponding to Caesar’s murder (Geor­ gies I, 481-483).

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As the fanner was so often represented in the Georgies as a general and his tools as "weapons/’ so the flames are here personified in turn, as taking part in a military operation. But the pleasure, the sense of right order implied by the simile, is delusive and ironic in the context of a real war. These fires get out of control; Pallas is killed. Skipping over Book XI (which is filled with the sound of trees cut down to supply funeral pyres, echoing the end of the Iliad) and considering Book XII, we find that war is compared to a flash flood overwhelming trees and crops alike; again, compared to a forest fire (notice that the laurels crackle now in flames) or com­ pared to a suddenly flooding torrent. Of course, these are natural disasters. Earlier, in the Georgies, Virgil told how the farmer s long efforts could suddenly be vitiated by fire or flood. Yet if these natu­ ral disasters were difficult enough to tolerate, let alone accept, with any sense of a controlling Providence, how should we feel about the less natural sufferings involved in war? This unnaturalness of war and what it does to people is marked in many ways by Virgil; not least, by a recurrence of the earlier leitmotif of desertion ( deserere ). This is particularly associated with Turnus’s tragedy, the destruction he brings about, and the tragic isolation that he, like Dido, must experience.13 But rather than trace minor repetitions of word, image, and metaphor, I should like to conclude my comments on the later Aeneid by singling out three descriptive passages that bear largely on the uprootedness of wartime. First, from Book XI (5-9):

13 See Aeneid XI, 412 (Tumus: si tarn deserti sumus), and 469-470 (Latinus deserting council and plans). Tumus calls Aeneas desertorem Asiae in XII, 15, but he later finds himself in the same surrealistic landscape of desola­ tion and despair as Dido (662-664): . . . circum hos utrimque phalanges stant densae strictisque seges mucronibus horret ferrea; tu currum deserto in gramme versas. Here deserto contrasts ironically with the iron crop of armed men that sprang up, as it were, from the soil (see above, note 11). The same word accompanies Aeneas’s move to attack Tumus (697-698: deserit . . . deserit), the betraying of Turnus by his broken sword (732, deserit), and the description of the habi­ tat of the evil screech owl, omen of Tumus’s death (863, in bustis out cutminibus desertis); this last again evokes the spiritually desolate atmosphere in which Aeneas and Tumus clash and the latter is isolated and then killed.

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Kenneth J. Reckford ingentem quercum decisis undique ramis constituit tumulo fulgentiaque induit arma, Mezenti ducis exuvias, tibi magne tropaeum bellipotens; aptat rorantis sanguine cristas telaque trunca viri,. . . [Lopping the branches all round from a giant oak, he erects it Upon a mound, and dresses the trunk with gleaming armour He’d stripped from the enemy general, Mezentius, as a trophy To the great War-god. He fastens up the blood-dabbled plumes, The broken-off spears of his foe,...]

The spoils of Mezentius are hung on the bare trunk as trophies. That is normal Roman procedure; we were pleased in Book III when Aeneas, anticipating Augustus’s victory, hung Greek trophies on a tree near Actium. But now everything is somehow mutilated.14 Branches are lopped from the living tree, blazing arms put in their place. A short while back, the wounded-yet-living Mezentius rested against a tree and hung his helmet from its branches; now he is dead. The helmet’s plumes shed a bloody dew, and the spears are “truncated.” It is as though the grotesque quality of death in battle had communicated itself to nature. The tree is a death tree, like the death shrubs in Book III that bled when Aeneas pulled at them. The landscape we are shown here is that of Hell. In Book XII, amid preparations (which will prove abortive) for 14 Aeneas’s hanging up the shield of Abas at Actium (Aeneid III, 286-288) anticipated Roman victory over Greece and also Octavian’s victory over Antony. The tree trunk traditionally represented the body of the conquered foe (Conington-Nettleship), but throughout the Aeneid Virgil in a less positive vein asso­ ciates the tree trunk with the mutilation of human bodies in war and the un­ naturalness of killing: cf. Priam’s death (above, note 4) and now Aeneid XI, 172-175 (Evander), magna tropaea ferunt quos dat tua dextera leto; tu quoque nunc stares immanis truncus in arvis, esset par aetas et idem si robur ab annis, Turne. In their different ways, the lopping of branches, the cutting down of trees for funeral pyres (XI, 133-139, echoing Homer and Ennius), the bloody dew, and the relation between our trophy passage and the Thracian episode in Book III all underline the unnaturalness and horror of death in a battle where no one really wins. The triumph theme is intentionally undercut; Virgil is writing, as ever, of tragic victory.

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single combat and a more rational and civilized conclusion of the war, Virgil singles out the sceptre of Latinus for detailed descrip­ tion (206-211): “ut sceptrum hoc” (dextra sceptrum nam forte gerebat) ‘ numquam fronde levi fundet virgulta nec umbras, cum semel in silvis imo de stirpe recisum matre caret posuitque comas et bracchia ferro, olim arbos, nunc artificis manus aere decoro inclusit patribusque dedit gestare Latinis.” [“As sure as this sceptre of mine, which I hold in my right hand, never Could put out new shoots and be dressed in light leaves to give men shade, Once it was cut away from low down on its parent tree In the forest, shedding its twigs and foliage to the knife: It was a growing thing, but the hand of a craftsman encased it In elegant bronze and made it the sceptre of the kings of Latium.”] Here Virgil adapts a famous passage from Book I of the Iliad , where Achilles swears by such a sceptre that he will stand apart from the ungrateful Greeks and not help them in war.15 Not only are memo­ ries of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon foreboding in the present context of attempted peace and harmony between Tro­ jans and Latins, which will be disrupted shortly by the usual divine and human interference. Achilles’s irreconcilable wrath is still more to the point; for although Turnus posed as a new Achilles confront­ ing Trojan enemies, we gradually realize that Aeneas, far more than 15 The stripping bare of the sceptre in Iliad I, 234-244, corresponds to Achilles’ sheer will and also the loneliness he must undergo. At the same time, Homer typically balances loss with new creation; the sceptre becomes emblem­ atic of the larger social order—challenged, to be sure, by Achilles—with its in­ herent sanctions. In Virgil’s treatment (a) the limb is described emphatically as losing its ‘ mother” and having “hair and arms” (foliage and branches) cut off; compare but also contrast the tender treatment of vines in Georgies II, 362-370. Yet (b), as in Homer, something new is created. The sceptre regains aesthetic beauty and becomes a political and religious symbol; patres compen­ sates in part for matre caret. The description also recalls the happy account (with Roman overtones) of ceremonies in Latinus’s palace in Aeneid VII, espe­ cially 173, sceptra accipere. Thus, this description contains the usual Virgilian tension between personal suffering or death and a more abstract historical glory or achievement.

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Turnus, has inherited the role and wrath of Achilles. How much so will be apparent when he furiously plunges his sword into the neck of his defeated, suppliant enemy. The branch cut from its parent tree and stripped of leaves anticipates this final human act and ex­ plains it in terms of desolation acting upon the human spirit. Aeneas shares much with Achilles. Yet Virgil's development of the simile raises some less personal questions about war, history, and fate. First, we are invited to feel an empathy with the branch. Deprived of its "mother,” stripped of “hair and arms” by the sword, it recalls all those bodies that are mutilated in war. Second, positive and negative elements are significantly intertwined in the change under­ gone by the branch when it is made into a sceptre. The aesthetic beauty and permanence of the branch sheathed in bronze replace natural life. And the sceptre, now wielded by the “Latin fathers” ( suggesting the Roman senate and contrasted with the lost "mother” ), comes to serve a valuable social purpose. The sceptre is thus one more emblem of that balance between loss and gain, per­ sonal suffering and historical fulfillment, that Virgil makes us feel throughout the Aeneid. At the same time, like the bleeding shrubs and the oak tree and the Golden Bough described earlier, the sceptre symbolizes the story of Aeneas’s inner spiritual develop­ ment, the way he is stripped progressively of self-will and love and friendship and every kind of personal satisfaction and the way his fate enforces an inner, almost metallic, discipline. But also, the sceptre symbolizes a certain incongruity between Aeneas and fate, the still human resistance that he harbors to the inevitable. The killing of Turnus will be Achillean, not only an inhuman and fated act, but at the same time a triumph of a very human passion. It will show how the hero’s soul has been stripped, as it were, of all green­ ery; but still more deeply, it will show how a living soul can never fully and finally be converted into an instrument or a talisman of metal. One last instance of uprooting: Aeneas pauses in mid-pursuit of Turnus to retrieve his spear, which is caught in the roots of a wild olive tree (XII, 766-787): Forte sacer Fauno foliis oleaster amaris hie steterat, nautis olim venerabile lignum, servati ex undis ubi figere dona solebant

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Laurenti divo et votas suspendere vestis; sed stirpem Teucri nullo discrimine sacrum sustulerant, puro ut possent concurrere campo. hie hasta Aeneae stabat, hue impetus illam detulerat fixam et lenta radice tenebat. incubuit voluitque manu convellere ferrum Dardanides, teloque sequi quern prendere cursu non poterat. turn vero amens formidine Tumus “Faune, precor, miserere” inquit “tuque optima ferrum Terra tene, colui vestros si semper honores quos contra Aeneadae bello fecere profanos.” dixit, opemque dei non cassa in vota vocavit. namque diu luctans lentoque in stirpe moratus viribus haud ullis valuit discludere morsus roboris Aeneas, dum nititur acer et instat, rursus in aurigae faciem mutata Metisci procurrit fratrique ensem dea Daunia reddit. quod Venus audaci nymphae indignata licere accessit telumque alta ab radice revellit. [Now it happened, a bitter-leafed wild olive, sacred to Faunus, Had stood here—a tree from of old held in great reverence by sailors Who, when they’d escaped from drowning, would hang on its boughs their offerings To the Laurentine god, hang up the clothing they’d vowed him. But the Trojans, to clear the arena for the two combatants, Had removed the trunk of this tree with no regard for its sanctity. Here, in the stump, was sticking Aeneas’ spear: the momentum Of flight had carried it here and wedged it firm in the tough wood. Aeneas now strained every muscle in an attempt to extract The weapon, wanting to catch with a missile the foe he could not Catch up by running. Tumus cried out in extremity of fear:— Faunus, I beg you, take pity! Dear native earth, hold fast to That spear! Remember how I have always paid you reverence, And how the Trojans profaned you to clear the field for our combat! This prayer to the god for help did not fall upon deaf ears. Aeneas, though long he struggled, bent over the tough-grained stump, Could not by any effort manage to free his spear

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Kenneth J . Reckford From the bite of the wood. While he fought and strained with violent exertions, The nymph Juturna, changing again into Metiscus The charioteer, ran forward and gave her brother his own sword. Venus, annoyed that the nymph was granted such freedom of action, Approached and tore out the spear from the deep grip of the tree stump.]

In Homers Iliad, Achilles chases Hector alongside the springs where in peacetime the Trojan women used to wash their clothing, a pathetic interpolation. Virgil also uses suspense, a delaying action, but the event he describes has still deeper thematic and emotional significance. We are made to feel the wastefulness, the impiety of the Trojans’ action. The tree was long sacred (like the laurel in Book VII). Now it has thoughtlessly been uprooted, and for what? To ‘ provide a clear field for running together’—as though war were an athletic contest. In the face of such pollution, such an af­ front to nature, it seems right that Faunus and Mother Earth should answer Turnus’s prayer, that Aeneas’s spear should be gripped fast by the tree’s roots—all that is left of that sacred growth, once hal­ lowed by tradition. And when Venus, with Olympian might, pulls the spear loose from the clinging wood, we are pleased, of course, for Aeneas’s success (and Rome’s), but we feel, even more urgently, the harshness and cruelty of that forever overriding fate. Now it would be quite wrong to interpret this or many another Virgilian passage in an exclusively negative way. The fashion today of reading the Aeneid as a sceptical and pessimistic poem is quite as misleading, not to say arbitrary and willful, as the simple-minded optimistic mode of interpretation ("a glorification of Rome and Augustus” ) against which we are today understandably overreact­ ing. The truth is that the truth is not simple. Let us reconsider the passage about the olive stump. Surely it is significant that Aeneas succeeds. He is in harmony with fate, or if you like, with the reality of things. Also, if we look at the tree objectively, we might realize (and a passage from the Georgies confirms the point) that the "wild olive with bitter leaves” is scarcely productive or lovable. By con­ trast, the next episode, the interlude on Olympus, confirms the con­ structive purpose of Aeneas’s labors. Trojan and Italian will be joined in a final, Roman harmony in which even Juno will play a

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part, and there will be an essential continuity between the future Rome and all that was valuable and strong in the Latin past. Yet it is very significant that Virgil ends the Aeneid on a negative note, the passionate killing of Tumus, whose soul "fled in outrage to the shades”; and significant, too, though in a different way, that the Olym­ pian dialogue is prefaced by the final image of uprooting. Victory is fused with defeat, achievement with loss. In striking contrast to the olive and fruit trees of the Odyssey—and intentionally, I think, to the trunk of the olive tree around which Odysseus built a bed­ chamber for himself and Penelope—we have, once more, the terrify­ ing vision of the hero who is homeless himself and makes others homeless also. And the image goes deeper, suggesting once again some outstanding negative and irrational factor, some deeply rooted resistance in history and in the cosmos (and correspondingly, as I argued earlier, in Aeneas himself to the very end). The trouble lies not just with Augustan ideology or with Rome. It is nearer the heart of things. Virgil’s tragic sense neither supplants nor is supplanted by his epic of personal and national achievement, but the two are so intimately fused—as in the oak tree or the Golden Bough, or the sceptre, or the roots of the wild olive tree—that they must finally be perceived as one. We have no portrait of Virgil, nothing like the photograph of Tol­ kien that appeared last month in celebration of his eightieth birthday and that shows him, a cross between hobbit and wizard, sprawled out among the extensive roots of some magnificent oak trees some­ where in England.16 It is good to be reminded that, for all their ar16 We may just possibly have copies of a contemporary bronze or marble bust of Virgil: see R. V. Schoder, S.J., “On Two Portraits of Virgil,” Vergilius 13 (1967): 9-15. One in the Villa Medici, derived from the Ara Pietatis Augustae of a .d . 43, shows a sensitive, careworn, compassionate face, the face we might expect to see on the author of the Aeneid. The other, a poor reproduction in mosaic, is at least symbolic; it shows Virgil flanked by the Muses of History and Tragedy. The photograph of Tolkien appeared in the January 2, 1972, issue of the (London) Sunday Times Magazine. Although I have omitted biographical indications from the present essay, it is worth noting that probably Virgil and certainly Tolkien experienced personal uprooting: the former probably lost his fathers farm (see Eclogue 9), the latter was brought, a sickly child, from South Africa before the age of four, and his father died soon afterward. Per­ haps a mixture of security and insecurity goes into the making of most great writers.

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tistic integrity, epic poems or epic fantasy novels are created by peo­ ple, living, breathing people, with their own thoughts and feelings, who enjoy, not just images of trees, but actual, living trees. The pho­ tograph helps us visualize a man deeply rooted in English soil. His brother, we are told, grows apple trees. It is not so very different (Tolkien might say) to be a professional philologist, busying oneself with language and literature, browsing among the roots of words and the roots of culture and civilization. And The Lord of the Rings, though hard to classify within any familiar genre (for fantasy and fairy tale occupy a suspect place, al­ most a demimonde, within the realm of literature), is a deeply root­ ed, deeply traditional story. The names, motifs, and tone betray the northern origins of the story and document, for example, Tolkien s enormous debt to Beowulf; but similar evidence makes it equally easy to show that Tolkien s story recapitulates the great western themes going back to Homer and Virgil.17 The hero still strives, re­ jects temptations, and makes tragic choices, and is at once a re­ sponsible free agent and a man overmastered by fate. Pietas, labor, fatum ("devotion,” "hard work,” "destiny” )—so Eliot envisioned the main themes of the Aeneid,18 and so they continue in western litera­ ture. The scholar and, we hope, the student are impressed by that very continuity, by tree and roots spreading over 2,700 years and more. They should be especially impressed because continuity 17 I am convinced, though I cannot argue the case properly here, that Virgil exercised a great indirect influence on Tolkien through the mediation of Tenny­ son. The latter s understanding of and debt to Virgil, acknowledged in his beau­ tiful tribute on the nineteenth centenary of Virgil’s death, can be seen through­ out his writings but especially in Idylls of the King and the treatment of the lonely, faithful, compassionate Arthur. And Tennyson continually influences Tolkien: compare, for example, the scene of Frodo’s passing into the West as observed by Sam, with the Passing of Arthur (and Bedivere’s place in it), which was itself probably influenced by the ending of Aeneid II: iamque iugis summae surgebat Lucifer Idae ducebatque diem . . . The Virgilian balance that we have been considering is well preserved by Ten­ nyson. Were it not for his upbeat ending, he would have come close to writing a Christian Aeneid in a minor key. 18 T. S. Eliot, “Virgil and the Christian World” (1943), reprinted in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Noonday Paperback, 1961).

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through change is a major theme—perhaps the major theme-—in the works with which we have been concerned. Long before Homer, heroic achievement was joined with personal loss. Gilgamesh lost his dearest friend, Enkidu; he sought immor­ tality, in vain. Achilles, in turn, loses Patroclus and comes to terms with his own mortality, choosing the "short but glorious life.” Odys­ seus triumphs, but loses his companions; his visit to the underworld sets all human achievement against the somber background of death and failure. In this light, his rejection of Calypso’s offer of immor­ tality, as of all other temptations to be more ( and less) than human, is the more heroic. But the Odyssey offers consolation, not just in personal success and rest after toil, but in the simple continuities of natural and social life: trees, family, the kingdom. Virgil raises the stakes. He extends the sense of loss from individual lives ("Like the generation of leaves,” said Homer, "so is the generation of men.” ) to the life of a people, a city, a civilization. In his description of the fall of the great ash tree that is Troy, we feel that compassionate and humane view of history that is illustrated in the famous anecdote about the younger Scipio. Looking over the desolation that was Car­ thage, Scipio quoted two verses from Homer: The day will come, when holy Ilium will fall, and Priam, and the people of Priam of the good ashen spear.19

Scipio was thinking, of course, about Rome. And so was Virgil. His entire epic is pervaded not only by a sense of the cost of achieve­ ment—Troy must fall, and Priam, so that Rome may be created— but also by a sense of the transience and failure that shadows even the goals (Roman victories, the Pax Augusta, the renewed Golden Age of peace and prosperity in Italy) for which all these sacrifices are made. And we have seen how the hero, Aeneas, suffers an up­ rooting in his soul, analogous to that of the Golden Bough, his pass­ port from the dead past into the Roman future, plucked with some resistance from the living tree. Similarly, in Tolkien, we grieve, not only at the death of individ­ uals who were loved (King Theoden dies, another green burial mound will be raised in Rohan) but also at the passing of a way of life, a very age. "I am sorry,” says Frodo, when two holly trees are 19 Polybius 39.5. The story is ben trovato.

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uprooted and thrown down before the doors of Moria. "I am sorry, for the trees were beautiful, and had stood for so long” (1 ,403). The point is not just moral, that bad creatures (or people) pollute the landscape. The sadness of time and change goes deeper. What will happen to the great forest of Fangora if the Ents never find the Entwives (and they never will in Middle-earth), never have any off­ spring to be tree herds in their turn? And for most readers of Tolkien, of all the “fair things” that “will fade and be forgotten,” the fairest is Lothlorien: O Lorien! The Winter comes, the bare and leafless Day; The leaves are falling in the stream, the River flows away. (I, 482) To cling to the past, to try to preserve it at all costs, is not only a moral temptation that plays into the hands of the Enemy; it is also fruitless. Change is ultimately irresistible. And this means that coop­ eration with reality involves suffering some degree of uprootedness and taking some degree of death and change into one’s soul. In the case of Merry and Pippin, who begin as irresponsible children, we see this acceptance as a normal psychological process of growing up, in wisdom as well as (comically) physique. Frodo’s uprooting pene­ trates the soul more deeply than that of the other characters; it is comparable, in certain ways, to what happens within Aeneas. The point seems paradoxical, for hobbits are not (one would think) naturally heroic. They are quiet folk who enjoy all the food and drink they can get, and pipe weed, and sleeping, and parties, and other familiar things. Yet this paradox, of the hobbit as hero, lies near the heart of Tolkien’s story. If even a hobbit can serve and act significantly in the enormously complicated chess game presently being played out—and even the prescient Gandalf cannot follow all the moves—then it must be that each of our own small lives is mean­ ingful and important, that our several moves count for good or ill in the overall game. That might seem encouraging; at least it shakes us out of our usual apathy. Yet it is equally true that we might be terri­ fied. For if the hobbit Frodo is a viable hero who speaks to our modern-day feelings and condition, he is also (though reluctantly) the successor of the reluctant Aeneas, not only as a civilized and hu­ mane hero who feels pity for others and never raises the sword idly, but also as fato profugus , an exile by force of destiny, a displaced person. The landscape of slag heaps through which Frodo creeps to­

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ward the Mountain of Fire becomes an image of his inner desola­ tion, a representation of the way the uprootedness of history has penetrated deep into his soul. And his final victory is deeply ambigu­ ous. He succumbs at last to the Ring, claims it for his own; only the wretched Gollum, whom he spared earlier ( a moral choice conspir­ ing in the usual way with Providence), bites off his finger with the Ring upon it and, exulting, falls into the abyss. The two interwoven themes are Virgilian: of the Other, almost the alter ego , who must be sacrificed as part of the cost of heroic achievement and destiny; and of the hero who suffers within himself a still deeper sacrifice. Like the plucking of the Bough, the throwing away of the Ring is, in many ways, a kind of death. I have not, of course, been comparing The Lord of the Rings criti­ cally with the Aeneid as a work of literature. That would be sense­ less. I am arguing that Tolkien, like Virgil, has written a tragic epic in which heroic accomplishment is so intricately fused with pain, loss, and even failure that the resulting balance becomes very diffi­ cult for the critic to describe. Tolkien appeals to us for many rea­ sons; not the least of these is because he affirms the old heroic values in a new guise, yet without blinking the realities of sadness, suffer­ ing, and loss. The man still interacts with the arms; heroic sacrifice, with destiny. Reading Virgil, then Tolkien, we are impressed by the continuity of major themes. Conversely—and the point is as impor­ tant as it is unscholarly—reading and rereading Tolkien prepare our minds and hearts surprisingly well for a rereading of Virgil. We grow in the process—with pleasure, and not without pain. But now, after exploring similarities, I want to suggest a basic dif­ ference between Virgil and Tolkien with which our tree meditation (coming full circle to the White Tree) may fittingly conclude. In Virgil, we find not only historic change and personal loss and uprooting (each reflecting the other) but also a third tragic element, that of uncertainty. On one level, uncertainty is a familiar aspect of the heroic journey. Again and again, and especially in Book III, Aeneas demonstrates his steadfastness by not selling out for a false security. In the central metaphor Virgil compares Aeneas’s develop­ ment to setting out to sea, into the unknown. Now we feel that Aeneas is acting like a hero, and we are told that, each time, he is re­ sponsive (as others are not) to fate and its demands: that is, pre­ sumably, to reality. Aeneas is the exemplar of pietas. That Roman

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concept, variously translated as “reverence” and “devotion” and im­ plying a hierarchical series of loyalties (to self, friends, followers, family, nation, gods), might today be called fidelity. Yet not only is fidelity not clearly rewarded for Aeneas, as it is for Odysseus and Penelope, or Aragom, by any personal fulfillment and happy ending, but also it never receives a clear, unequivocal, convincing justification for the reader. We never know that the achievement is worth the cost. The pictures of the Roman future, culminating in the Pax Augusta, are themselves shadowed by death, failure, and uncertainty, from Brutus’s patriotic yet humanly intolerable killing of his rebel sons to the untimely death of the younger Marcellus, Augustus’s heir and Rome’s best hope. Uncertainty, lack of final justification, the threat of an ultimate meaninglessness—these are not just obstacles cloud­ ing the hero’s journey but an irreducible part of existence as it is apprehended by the poet himself. Eliot was wrong, I believe, when he said that amor (love) was missing from the Aeneid.20 (There are tragic passions, for example, those of Dido, Turnus, and Amata, but Eliot was speaking rather of the separation of Aeneas’s heroic impulse from erotic self-assertion or devotion. This, however, is to miss Aeneas’s amor fati and the flame of creative sexuality which, in Book VIII and especially the Venus-Vulcan scene, enters into his building for the Roman future.) Aeneas loves, but his love is denied human actualization—the me­ tallic bough again, the bronze-sheathed sceptre. Dante seems to come closer to understanding Virgil when he places him “among those suspended” in limbo—the word sospesi nicely evoking that balance of opposites we so often feel in image and act in the Aeneid.21 Better still, for all his enormous love and admiration for the “leader, guide, and master,” Dante saw Virgil as suffering disio sanza speme , “desire without hope,” because salvation had not finally been 20 See above, note 18. 21 See Inferno 2.52: “Io era tra color, che son sospesi.” The idea is developed in the description of limbo in canto 4: souls there are not tortured, yet sigh with grief; their merit was inadequate without baptism, and, lacking Christian­ ity, they failed to worship God rightly, so that (40-42): Per tai difetti, non per altro rio, semo perduti, e sol di tanto offesi, che sanza speme vivemo in disio. Cf. Purgatorio 3.40-45; 7.4-9 and 25-36.

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revealed to him. How accurate, not condescending, that placement seems. Virgil is not tortured among the sinners of a hell modeled on his own Sixth Book—sinners like the suicides who have become the stunted trees of a death wood, shedding heart’s blood in agony whenever a branch is broken from their limbs.22 Rather, with Homer and other honored poets, Virgil enjoys a hemisphere of light amid darkness, a knightly castle, green fields of repose. But he is tortured by his inability to attain the joy for which he instinctively strives. The Aeneid and its hero display fidelity and compassion that come very close to Christian faith and charity. What is missing, most of all, is hope. And in Tolkien? It has been argued that the background of his heroic story is after all dark, that his subject, in the last analysis, is doom. I cannot agree. The Lord of the Rings is still a fairy tale with a happy ending. And Tolkien’s own essay on fairy tales published in his Tree and Leaf leads us to believe that this happy ending, os “eucatastrophe,” reflects, not only wishful thinking, but also an underlying pattern of Christian belief.23 Christianity has its tragic side, culminating in the Crucifixion; but the dramatic movement 22 In the mournful wood of Inferno 13, the souls of those who committed vio­ lence against themselves, suicide, are punished in a manner reflecting their sin: they fall like random seed into the wood, springing up into dry, twisted, poisonbearing shrubs that bleed when rent. We might contrast the happy plucking of the reed in Purgatorio 1.133-136: Quivi mi cinse si com’ altrui piacque: oh maraviglia! che qual egli scelse lumile pianta, cotal si rinacque subitamente la onde Favelse. Putnam, The Poetry of the Aeneid, p. 221 note 15, remarks that this rush “looks to the golden bough for some of its attributes (it springs up again as soon as torn off),” but its plucking lacks the Virgilian ambiguity. Any sugges­ tion of final misery or final uncertainty would be inappropriate to the Pwrgatorio. Yet after all the Golden Age imagery of the Earthly Paradise, there is something curiously disturbing about the allegorical vision of the tree (history, Rome, the Empire) in canto 32, as it is first renewed (by Christianity, through the Church) and then stripped once more of leaves and bark through mens impiety and lack of faith. Is history less easily redeemed than the individual soul? Yet the Purgatorio ends significantly with an image of the green, not the withered, tree—an image (like the White Tree in Tolkien) of hope and salvation. 23 Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 70-73.

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continues from death to resurrection, from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. And that, for a believer, makes all the difference. The White Tree of Gondor, with which we began, was a sign of promise to Aragom: not only of his marriage with Arwen Evenstar, but also of a continuity far beyond that. In the words of an old prophecy: The Old that is Strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. There is something intentionally primitive about the return of the King and the revival of nature accompanying it, the turning of winter to spring, the bountiful new crops of strawberries, children, pipe weed, com, and barley in the Shire in the miraculous Year of Plenty, s .r . 1420. But Tolkien wants to portray more than the renewal of na­ ture. The Party Tree, which blooms again in the Shire, is an analogue, on a lower, more cheerful level, of the White Tree itself; and behind the White Tree stand other trees: the Tree of Life in the midst of the Garden of Eden; the Tree of Knowledge, the plucking of whose fruit “brought death into the world, and all our Woe” and caused man to be expelled from Paradise; and that other, naked tree of the Cross, on which sin was atoned for, death overcome, and the gates of Para­ dise reopened. The White Tree, like the Golden Bough, reflects the old, primitive awareness that victory is bought by human sacrifice, life won through death. And we have seen in the experience of Frodo, as well as that of Aeneas, the physical and psychological and spiritual agony of the naked tree in the desolate place. But Tolkien’s tree bursts into flower once more, as Virgil’s does not, and that makes all the difference. It seems ironic that, with the return of the King and the flourish­ ing of trees, we have returned to the happy ending and older world of Homer’s Odyssey. Homer is renewed by Virgil, a poet who, so deeply steeped in poetic tradition and inspired by the great masters example, masters the tradition and creates an original and vital work of art within it because he has something new and important to say. As a result, it matters that Virgil is similarly renewed, not only in the great epics of Dante or Milton, but also in less ambitious, yet still important, forms like those of Tennyson and (if I may say it) Tol­ kien. Here continuity through change becomes more than a literary theme; it is a central law of literary creation. The achievement of a

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new great story gives delight. Like Laertes’ fruit trees, it encour­ ages and reassures us. Like the Golden Bough, it draws us by imper­ ceptible stages into the deepest mysteries of human existence—not without that understanding which is inseparable from the accept­ ance of suffering, pain, loss, sacrifice, and uncertainty. And like the White Tree, it is a sign of hope for us exiles and wanderers between one age and another.

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The Business of Roman Comedy

ERICH SEGAL

Comedy is, in one sense, the perfect crime. It effects a magic larceny that temporarily diverts the moral bill collector. Normal checks and balances cease to operate; perpetrators of out­ rageous acts are not called into account. Comic heroes get away with behavior that would normally require them to pay a debt to society. The preponderance of financial imagery in the preceding para­ graph is hardly coincidental. Similar language often describes moral and monetary attitudes. Debt and guilt are really two sides of the same coin that buys comedy its laughter. It is all a funny business wherein business contributes richly to the fun—especially in ancient Rome. But before turning to a specific appraisal of Roman comedy, let us examine further the ambiguous association between money and morality. Nietzsche went so far as to assert that the cardinal notion of guilt originates from the very material notion of debt.1 In an important 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1887), Zweite Abhandlung, Ch. 4, passim.

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essay on comedy, Ludwig Jekels remarked that “the substitution of the idea of money debt for that of moral guilt is hardly surprising to the psycho-analyst, who frequently observes this substitutive rela­ tion in the dreams and resistances of his patients.”2 Moreover, this linkage finds philological substantiation in the many languages that employ the same word to denote both debt and guilt.3 Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I best dramatizes this Janus-like concept, offering a clear paradigm of the comic process. With the reader’s indulgence, a digression to Elizabeth’s England will enable us to return with greater perspective to Plautus’s Rome. Sauter, as it were, pour mieux reculer. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal lives in a magnetic field between dalli­ ance and duty, which is to say between palace and pub. In the first, solemn statecraft is the business, and a common psychological atti­ tude becomes a literal fact: the hero’s father is a king. At the op­ posite pole is Eastcheap, where Hal plays the truant from duty, sporting under the aegis of that devilish surrogate father, Falstaff. Fat Jack is the unchallenged champion in the art of avoiding every kind of responsibility. Which is, of course, what makes him the king of comic heroes. Whatever the debt, he never pays. At every level, Henry IV is replete with monetary imagery. At the play’s outset, after much lighthearted banter with Falstaff, Hal re­ veals that his delinquency is itself an involvement calculated to en­ hance his worth upon “redemption” : So, when this loose behavior I throw off And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes; And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault, 2 Ludwig Jekels, “On the Psychology of Comedy” (first published 1926), trans. I. Jarosy in Selected Papers (New York: International Universities Press, 1970), p. 99. 3This is also pointed out by Jekels ( “On the Psychology of Comedy” ), who cites German, French, and Polish examples. At least a vestige of this association also appears in Elizabethan English. For it is no jocular pun that Lady Macbeth makes when she speaks of her intention to smear blood on the dead king’s servants: 111 gild the faces of the grooms withal, For it must seem their guilt ( II.ii.56-57)

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Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. Fll so offend to make offense a skill, Redeeming time when men least think I will. (I.ii.197-205)

Even the overplot deals with debt and payment, whether it be the king’s guilt feelings for the death of Richard II or his refusal to ran­ som captured Mortimer: Shall our coffers, then, Be emptied to redeem a traitor home? Shall we buy treason? and indent with fears When they have lost and forfeited themselves? (I.iii.85-88)

Heroic Hotspur is no less concerned with the balance sheet, as when he cries for reparation against King Henry: To answer all the debt he owes to you Even with the bloody payment of your deaths. (I.iii.185-186)

Financial preoccupations are ubiquitous, whether they be Falstaff’s scheme to rob cash en route to the king’s exchequer or his rich excuses when he is subsequently out-thieved. Later Hal also dis­ covers in Falstaff’s pocket a gigantic unpaid bill for pleasures past (II.iv.505). But Falstaff pays only in puns: Prince. Sirrah, do I owe you a thousand pound? Falstaff. A thousand pound, Hal? A million! Thy love is worth a million; thou owest me thy love. (III.iii.129—131)

Likewise, the only “reckonings” Fat Jack acknowledges are sexual (cf. I.ii.44—64). Falstaff would even evade man’s ultimate debt: Prince. Why, thou owest God a death. Falstaff. ’Tis not due yet: I would be loath to pay him before his day. (V.i.126-128)4

In direct and deliberate contrast, Prince Hal eventually accepts all his responsibilities. When he arrives at the palace he informs the king that he regards Hotspur as nothing more than his bill col­ lector and that he intends to "tear the reckoning from his heart” 4 Falstaff is the precise opposite of Everyman in the famous morality play. Everyman constantly reiterates his concern with settling his moral account be­ fore dying: “to make my reckoning and my debts pay” (English Morality Plays and Moral Interludes, ed. Edgar T. Schell and J. P. Shuchter [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969], line 865).

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(II.ii.147-152). In leaving the Boar’s Head, Hal is forsaking the world of what he has called “playing holidays” (I.ii.192). In as many words, the world of Comedy. Shakespeare’s palace-pub dynamic may be readily translated into Roman terms. To Plautus the antinomies were forum and festivus locus. The first was, of course, the financial center of ancient Rome; the second, the playwright’s own concept of the Roman theater. And we must bear in mind that, when Plautus composed, the stage was constructed especially for the play, then immediately dismantled on the morrow.5 The theatrical occasion was unique, officially a holiday. The celebrants gathered in a place as unusual as it was ephemeral: nunc qua adsedistis caussa in festivo loco, comoediai quam nos acturi sumus et argumentum et nomen vobis eloquar. (Miles Gloriosus 83-85) [I’ll tell you why you’ve gathered in this festive spot, The comedy we will enact, its name and plot.] This prologue to one of Plautus’s earliest plays indicates that both artist and audience were aware of the holiday nature of the theatri­ cal event. And while the citizenry packed the festivus locus, the busi­ ness district was completely deserted. As Plautus remarks in another prologue, tranquillum est, Alcedonia sunt circum forum ( Casim 26) [All’s calm, a halcyon quiet floats about the forum]. This is a most atypical state of affairs; the forum normally bustled with business ac­ tivity as the Romans frantically pursued profit. Horace testifies to the acquisitive, avaricious character of the Romans: “O cives, cives, quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos.” haee Ianus summus ab imo prodocet, haec recinunt iuvenes dictata senesque. ( Epist. 1.1.53-55) [“O citizens, citizens, get money, first of all get money. Be worth a lot—then afterward be worthy.” These words great Janus, banking deity, proclaims across the forum, and these same dictates are echoed by the young and by the old.] What makes the business of Plautine comedy so extraordinary is the obsessive emphasis on business in ordinary Roman life. Since other 5 See Margarete Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, 2d ed. rev. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 168. The first permanent theater in Rome was constructed in 55 b .c .

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accounts echo Horace's description, the contrast in Roman comedy becomes all the more significant.6 Take the passage from the Casina prologue that we have already quoted in brief: Eicite ex animo curam atque alienum aes, ne quis formidet flagitatorem suom: ludi sunt, ludus datus est argentariis; tranquillum est, Alcedonia sunt circum forum, (lines 23-26) [Just kick out all your cares, and as for debts, ignore ’em. Let no one fear fierce creditors will sue. It’s holiday for everyone—for bankers, too. All’s calm, a halcyon quiet floats around the forum.] Every line contains a specific financial or business reference to debts, creditors, bankers, and finally to the banking center itself. Most significant for this essay is the collocation in line 23 of anxiety and debt, cura and alienum aes. Once again moral and monetary obliga­ tions merge into nonspecific ‘ worries.” But specifically worrisome to the people of Rome. The Romans were obsessed with payment in both senses of the word. Theirs was a patriarchal society where one owed one’s father the debt of absolute obedience. The country’s leaders were patres ; treason was parricidium. Indeed, Sallust calls Catiline’s co-conspira­ tors parricidae rei publicae (Cat. 51.25). Moreover, finance was a filial duty, profit a moral obligation, waste a cardinal sin.7 In fact, the association between moral and material debt may find its strongest expression in the Roman mind. Which is why its frequent flouting in Roman comedy makes the genre both comic and Roman.8 Plautus’s Menaechmi dramatizes the contrast between everyday Roman industria and holiday voluptas.9 Here the house of Menaech6 Polybius 31.26-27. See also Georgia Williams LefRngwell, Social and Private Life at Rome in the Time of Plautus and Terence (New York: Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 1918), p. 132. I discuss the Plautine treatment of business matters in Chapters II and III of Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). 7 See Segal, Roman Laughter, pp. 53-69. 8 I am discussing Plautus, not Terence, who wrote deliberately un-Roman, pseudo-Greek comedies. On the other hand, the fragments suggest that Naevius and Caecilius wrote in “Plautine,” i.e., Roman style. 9 I examine this at length in “The Menaechmi: Roman Comedy of Errors,” Yale Classical Studies 21 (1969): 77-93.

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mus is, broadly speaking, like King Henry’s palace, the locus of duty, restraint, obligations—and even economy. The house of Erotium likewise corresponds to the Boars Head Tavern as the center of indulgence, prodigality, and pleasure enhanced by payment evaded.10 And yet the Menaechmi is in many ways atypical of Plau­ tus, a comedy of errors and not guile. Other plays more Plautine (and hence more Roman) easily illustrate the argument of this es­ say. Let us pay some attention to the Mostellaria. This ‘little ghost story” contains all the elements that combined to make Plautus the most successful comic author in history. No playwright better under­ stood, or catered to, his public's preoccupations. The Mostellaria begins with a lively agon between clever slave Tranio and loyal (ergo unclever) slave Grumio.11 In their masters absence Tranio has led astray the old man s once paragonal son. The puritanical Grumio is outraged: nam ego ilium corruptum duco quom his factis studet; quo nemo adaeque iuuentute ex omni Attica antehac est habitus parcus nec magi' continens, is nunc in aliam partem palmam possidet. uirtute id factum tua et magisterio tuo. (lines 28-32) [That boy, who out of all the boys in Attica Was once so chaste, so frugal, once so well-behaved, Now takes the prizes in completely diiferent sports Thanks to all your tutoring and all your talent.] The translation does not really do justice to the special Roman connotations of virtus in the final line.12 For Grumio’s terminology implies that Tranio has subverted every good Roman virtue in the 10 Debt and guilt also play a vital role in Shakespeare’s version of the Men­ aechmi. The overplot of the Comedy of Errors involves the merchant Egeons condemnation to death because he cannot redeem himself with the necessary thousand marks. The main plot has the Plautine deliveries of merchandise to the wrong twin, and the subplot has Dromio of Ephesus bemoaning the “marks” on his body. 11 Ben Jonson used this scene as his model for the opening of the Alchemist, a play that in other ways as well shows the influence of the Mostellaria. In Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare names two servants Tranio and Grumio, but here the resemblance seems to end. 12 See D. C. Earl, “Political Terminology in Plautus,” Historia 9 (1960):

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lad and become—like Falstaff to Hal—a devilish corrupter of youth.13 Indeed, Grumio’s words resemble those of King Henry when he laments that all the good qualities of Hotspur are lacking in his heir. The king envies: A son who is the theme of honors tongue, Amongst a grove the very straightest plant; Who is sweet fortune’s minion and her pride; Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him, See riot and dishonor stain the brow Of my young Harry. (I.i.81-86) In the Mostellaria, riot and dishonor likewise stain the brow of young Philolaches. And the imagery of his delinquency is also ex­ pressed in financial terms. While his father was abroad he has “in­ vested” in pleasure. He has purchased a slave girl and freed her. When the old man unexpectedly returns, clever Tranio must put him off the track by pretending that the cash has gone to buy a new house. As any good (Roman) father would, Theopropides rejoices at the news: patrissat: iam homo in mercatura vortitur. (line 639) [He is his fathers son, he’s going into business!! Of course his son has actually been neither filial nor frugal. In fact, his true behavior is alliteratively described: Et, postquam eius hinc pater sit profectus peregre, perpotasse adsiduo. (lines 975-976) [And following his father s faring forth For foreign parts, the fellow fell to full-time frolic.] The real situation is not patrissare but perdidit pattern (line 983). Not taking after father but merely taking him. And early in the play we have seen the lad utter parricidal thoughts. When he first spies his mistress he exclaims: 234-243; J. HellegouarcTi, Le Vocabulaire Latin des Relations et des Partis Po­ litiques Sous la République (Paris: Editions Belles Lettres, 1963), pp. 242-245. 13 Indeed young Philolaches actually places himself under the aegis of his

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utinam meus nunc mortuos pater ad me nuntietur, ut ego exheredem me meis bonis faciam atque haec sit heres. (lines 233-234) [Oh, someone bring the news right now—the news my fathers dead! I’d disinherit myself and make her heir to all my goods!] The puritanical, parsimonious Roman would virtually equate prodigality with parricide. Yet Plautus’s young hero thinks of both deeds and joyfully merges the two. As Philolaches eavesdrops, his sweetheart’s cynical maid warns her that the young lad will soon bankrupt himself since he shows no parsimonia. Eventually, “iam ista quidem apsumpta res erit” (line 235) [all his current wealth will soon be in a state of ruin]. The Roman spectator would not fail to appreciate the ironic echo in Tranio’s subsequent exclamation. When he learns that his elder master has inopportunely returned, he cries, “apsumpti sumus” (line 366). The irony persists. Just what is a good investment? To Philolaches it is pleasure, the purchase of Philematium’s freedom:

Philolaches. nec quicquam argenti locaui iam diu usquam aeque bene. Philematium. certe ego, quod te amo, operam nusquam melius potui ponere. Philolaches. bene igitur ratio accepti atque expensi inter nos conuenit.14 (lines 302-304) [Philolaches.

You’re the best investment deal I’ve ever made in my whole life. Philematium. Nor could I have better placed my whole concern than in your love. Philolaches. Look at our account: income and outgo balance perfectly.]15 own slave: “in tuam custodelam meque et meas spes trado, Tranio” (line 406) [Tranio, take custody of all my wealth and welfare too]. 14 Philolaches also exclaims that he could have never made a better invest­ ment: numquam aeque id bene locassem (line 242). There is full discussion of such financial language in the play in Eleanor Winsor Leach, “De exemph meo ipse aedificato: An Organizing Idea in the Mostellaria,** Hermes 97 (1969): 329-331. 15 Cf. the remark of Edward T. Sonnenschein in his edition of the Mostellaria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907; rep. 1966), p. 97, on line 304: “A genuine Roman banking metaphor: ‘the account of receipts and expenditure balance admirably/ ”

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On the other hand, Philolaches’ father prefers more lucrative affairs. To him investment evokes thoughts solider and stolider. Real estate, for example. Thus, when he is informed by Tranio that his money has been used to purchase the house next door, Theopropides tours the place and then enthuses: “bene res nostra conlocata est istoc mercimonio” (line 915) [Our cash is well invested in this merchandise]. The contrasting life styles between father and son center on the locatio or investment of res nostra. And there is always the presence of debt. In an early scene we witness the enactment of what will later metamorphose into meta­ phor. When the neighbor complains that his house has no shady areas, he laments that the sun never leaves, but rather "quasi flagitator astat usque ad ostium” (line 768) [It hangs around my door as if it were a debt collector]. The image is anything but coincidental. Indeed, the basic conflict and essential comic joy of the Mostellaria are vividly enacted in the scene with an actual fkgitator, a debt collector. Just as clever Tranio has appeased old Theopropides with his real estate acquisi­ tion fable, who should enter but the very man who lent him the now-squandered cash? This moneylender is obsessed with profit. In fact, he has just come from the forum where he has been trying desperately to make more investments (the verb is again locarey line 535). Spying Tranio, his debtor, he wastes no words:

Tranio. Salvere iubeo te, Misargyrides, bene. Misargyrides. Salve et tu. quid de argentost? (lines 568-569) [Tranio. Hello, Misargyrides, hope you re feeling well. Misargyrides. Hello to you. Now what about my money?] A squabble ensues in which Tranio deftly evades the banker s de­ mands for his interest. Meanwhile, the slave's master stands in­ genuously by. Should old Theopropides ever catch on to what the matter is, there will also be hell to pay. The scene rises to comic crescendo with the debt collector shrieking:

Misargyrides. Tranio.

cedo faenus, redde faenus, faenus reddite. daturin estis faenus actutum mihi? datur faenus mi? faenus illic, faenus hie! nescit quidem nisi faenus fabularier. (lines 603-606)

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[Misargyrides. My interest now, my interest, interest; pay me interest! Will you please pay my interest to me right away? I want my interest! Tranio. “Interest” here and "interest” there. The only interest this man has in life is “interest”!] But Misargyrides never does collect, for this is comedy and the pun is the only coin of the realm. The bilking of a bill collector is a favorite theme of Roman comedy—especially since the creditor is most often trying to collect the price of pleasure, that is, a girl.16 In this very special world there is not even a moral price to pay. A prime example is the finale of the Mostellaria. Here Tranio s rogueries are at last exposed—and he glories in them: fateor peccauisse, amicam liberasse apsente te, faenori argentum sumpsisse; id esse apsumptum praedico. (lines 1139^-1140) [Yes I will confess: he sinned while you were gone. He freed his girl, Drew a lot of cash on interest, threw the lot of cash away.] But his master Theopropides is determined to punish him. In real life, Roman masters could actually put disobedient slaves to death, a fact that would not have been lost on the audience. Yet note how Tranio finally escapes:

Tranio.

quid gravaris? quasi non eras iam commeream aliam noxiam: ibi utrumque, et hoc et illud, poteris ulcisci probe . . . Theopropides. . . . abi inpune. . . (lines 1178-1180)

[Tranio.

Why be annoyed? You know tomorrow Til commit some fresh new crime.

16 Such is the fate of the pimp Dordalus in the Versa. In fact, he is quite as lucre-loco as Misargyrides. Witness his dun: Cedo sis mi argentum, da mihi argentum, inpudens, possum [a] te exigere argentum? argentum, inquam, cedo, quin tu mi argentum reddis? nihilne te pudet? leno te argentum poscit. . . {Versa, lines 422-425) [My money, please give me my money, nasty man! I must demand my money from you! Money please! Will you deliver money, please? Oh shame on you! The pimp demands his money!]

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Then you’ll collect revenge for both—for what IVe done and what Til d o . . . Theopropides. . . . all right, no punishment.. .] The key word is eras, tomorrow. Tomorrow there will be business as usual; tomorrow payments will be made. This very same word had earlier convinced the moneylender to relent: petito eras (line 64), collect tomorrow. And so the money-mad Misargyrides quits the stage, thinking, “sat habeo si eras fero” (line 654) [I’m satisfied if I collect tomorrow]. Tomorrow is also the excuse offered by the Casina prologue to make the audience forget cura, alienum aes—and even fear of a flagitator (lines 23-24). The bankers are on holiday—at least for today. But: ratione utuntur, ludis poscunt neminem, secundum ludos reddunt autem nemini. (lines 27-28) [While the games are on, they wisely never try to dun, But after, when the games are through, they pay off none!] Employing their ratio, their mental balance sheet, the bankers realize that they can always make their shrewd-thinking profit secundum ludos, after the festival. This peripheral awareness that business will resume tomorrow permits the insouciance of Roman holiday humor. The occasion is extraordinary and so is the place where they have gathered. In this festivus locus, all Roman thoughts are banished be they of cura, alienum aes , or, as would be more likely, both combined. Pseudolus’s remark epitomizes the spectator s own experience: “in loco festiuo sumus festiue accepti” (line 1254) [we have had festive entertainment in a festive spot]. And tomor­ row everyone would be back in the forum. The festivus locus would literally have disappeared. Thus, there is a simple if paradoxical explanation for the abun­ dance of financial imagery in Plautus: it was intended precisely to distract the audience from financial thoughts. To make the Roman spectator forget his business was, in fact, the very business of Ro­ man comedy.17 17 Those familiar with my previous writings on this subject may have dis­ cerned some thematic dittographies in this essay. The organizers of the symposi­ um bade me run this risk in hopes of introducing Roman comedy to a more gen­ eral audience. All translations in this essay are my own.

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Ovids Metamorphosis of Myth

G. K A R L G A L I N S K Y

It is a commonplace in the history of mythological litera­ ture that myth, in order to stay alive, must constantly be readapted and reinterpreted. Such creative adaptation—and I am not con­ cerned, to use a distinction made by Benedetto Croce,1 with the exegetical adaptations of myth—can come from many impulses and is not without its difficulties. One of these was outlined in the early eighteenth century by Dr. Samuel Johnson. "We have been too early acquainted,” he wrote, “with the poetical heroes to expect any pleasure from their revival; to show them as they have already been shown is to disgust by repetition; to give them new qualities or new adventures, is to offend by violating received notions/'2 1 In his critique of Jean Seznec’s The Survival of the Pagan Gods, entitled “Gli dei antichi nella tradizione mitologica del Medioevo e del Rinascimento,” in Varieta di storia letteraria e civile 2 (1949): 50-65. The translations from the Metamorphoses are those of Rolfe Humphries, reprinted by permission of Indi­ ana University Press. 2 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, Nicholas Rowe, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), II, 58.

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When Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses, eighteen centuries earlier, the problem was even more acute because it was compounded by what we may call the existential crisis of Graeco-Roman myth. Few, if any, of Ovid’s contemporaries believed in the literal truth of myth or considered it as expressing realities of a high order. Myth had been severed from its traditional, religious base and, as was shown in the failure of the religious program of Augustus, to infuse the old meaning into it on a grand scale was impossible. On a smaller scale, however, it was possible, as is exemplified by Vergils epic where the metaphysical and historical components of myth render it pro­ foundly meaningful. But because the Aeneid is the treatment of a myth in depth rather than in breadth, the range of Vergil’s myth­ ology remained limited. By contrast, Ovids undertaking, again in terms of mythology, was far more ambitious. He presented more than 250 myths drawn from all genres of the ancient literary tradi­ tion, and this in itself makes it difficult to put a genre label on the Metamorphoses. The Metamorphoses thus is the most compre­ hensive, creative mythological work that has come down to us from antiquity. Its comprehensiveness and its use as a handbook have tended to obscure Ovid’s creative achievement, the revival of myth on an unprecedented scale. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid was con­ cerned not so much with mythological metamorphoses—because metamorphosis is quite tangential to many stories—as he was con­ cerned, and had to be, with the metamorphosis of myth. How was Ovid able to metamorphose myth? He suggests the answer in a lengthy passage in the Second Book of the Art of Love , where he extols the merits of versatility of mind and ease of ex­ pression. The mythological example that he adduces is Odysseus, more specifically, Odysseus complying with Calypso’s request to tell her the story of the fall of Troy ( Art 2.123-142). Now Calypso was rather insatiable, even for such delights as a good story, and she repeated the request to him time and again. Each time, Odysseus complied, and he told her the same story, the story of the fall of Troy. But the important difference was that he managed to tell it aliter—differently or in a different way: ille referre aliter saepe solebat idem (128). Taking into account the formidable tal­ ents of both Ovid and Odysseus, we might surmise that Calypso heard the same story in the style of epic, elegy, epistle, suasoria , tragedy, epyllion, aition, and perhaps even satyr play, even if the

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last may have involved a somewhat radical transformation of the Trojan Horse. But Odysseus, in the Art of Love , like Ovid in the Metamorphoses,3 would look upon a traditional myth in terms of the challenge to referre idem aliter. In the Metamorphoses, the adoption of this principle had two more specific consequences for the mythological narrative on which I should like to concentrate. The first is the constantly varying tonality of the narrative. In most of the individual stories and in the Metamorphoses in general, Ovid deliberately refuses to sus­ tain a consistent tone or mood. Instead, the Metamorphoses thrive on the juxtaposition of the serious with the comic, of the logical with the incongruous, and of the straight with the playful. A related quality of Ovid’s narrative is his basically untragic presentation of myth and the resulting tension—one of the main tensions in the poem—between the traditionally profound and serious implications of a theme and Ovids frequent indifference to them. I should like to single out for detailed consideration the stories of Erysichthon and Narcissus, not only because they illustrate these characteristics very well, but also because they are freer than other stories from the dilemma defined by Dr. Johnson. These stories had no extensive tradition in Greek literature, and Ovid here could create even more freely than he did on other occasions. His mythopoeia thus involves both the make-up of the actual stories and the narrative technique and devices. Let me first turn to the story of Erysichthon (8.738-878). We have a good basis for comparison here in the version of the 3 The passage is a good example of the many links, which Ovidian scholarship in the last fifty years has tended to ignore, between Ovid’s earlier poetry and the Metamorphoses. Early in this century, E. K. Rand still could state the obvious: “The Amores, apart from its own merit, is biographically significant in that it presents in the germ all the vital interests to which Ovid later turned” ( “Ovid and the Spirit of Metamorphosis,” in Harvard Essays on Classical Subjects, ed. H. W. Smith [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard College Press, 1912], p. 233). But not much later, under the influence of Richard Heinze’s Ovid’s elegische Erzäh­ lung ( Sitzungsberichte Leipzig, Phil.-Hist. Klasse. 71 [1919] fase. 7), scholars started dissecting the elegiac from the epic Ovid. The variety, however, of both tone and subject of the Metamorphoses defies such simple categorization and the poet’s ingenium (cf. Amores 1.15.14 and Trist. 3.3.74) merely worked on a larger scale in the Metamorphoses, whose main theme is love, than it had in his shorter love poems. For his attitude to Odysseus, compare Ovid s identification with the Greek in Trist. 1.2.9 and Ex Ponto 1.3.33-34.

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Greek poet Callimachus, who incorporated the myth into his Hymn to Demeter. The basic characteristics of the story as Callimachus tells it are that it is rather straightforward and forms a consistent whole. Because he wants to build a house for himself, Erysichthon, the young son of Triop as, goes into the forest with twenty attendants to cut trees. They happen on a grove sacred to Demeter. The first tree they cut down cries aloud, and Demeter, disguised as a priestess, asks Erysichthon to desist. He replies that he needs a house for banqueting, whereupon the goddess appears in her true form—her step touching the earth, her head reaching unto Olym­ pus—and sends perpetual hunger on him. In the subsequent and longer part of the narrative (lines 68-118), the poet focuses on the destructive effects of Erysichthon s affliction upon his family and their social status. The parents desperately want to maintain their respectability and tiy to conceal the true state of Erysichthon s condition by keeping him home and devising ever-new excuses for declining invitations. Meanwhile, the youth impoverishes them by eating up everything, even the family cat. Finally, with no edibles or money for edibles left at home, the parents’ struggle is lost as Erysichthon goes to the crossroads to beg and eat refuse. In short, Callimachus transposes the myth into the reality of everyday bourgeois life, and the narration takes its inner logic and consistency from there. The drawing of this genre scene thus is replete with concrete details, such as the exact number of the servants and a minute description of the various household animals.4 The setting of the story is chosen accordingly, as Callimachus pictures himself and the reader as standing in the streets of Alexandria among the women who are expecting the approach of the procession of the Sacred Basket of Demeter. It is they, the worthy middle-class housewives, who tell the story of Erysichthon, and the milieu of the story is theirs. In sum, Callimachus gives his narration an orderly progression, a consistent tone, and a clear focus. These qualities are virtually absent in Ovid’s version. It is a fanci­ 4 See H. Diller, “Die dichterische Eigenart von Ovids Metamorphosen,” in Ovid, ed. M. von Albrecht and E. Zinn (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), p. 327. I have also benefited from K. Büchner’s comparison of the Callimachean and the Ovidian version in Humanitas Romana (Heidelberg: Winter, 1957), pp. 208-220.

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ful, almost discontinuous sequence of episodes, which Ovid develops independently of one another and which he delights in pro­ longing. Concurrently, the main story’s slender thread, in a re­ markable coincidence of form and content, is attenuating as rapidly as Erysichthon. The tone is not consistent, and only Ovid’s narrative bravura receives special emphasis. In this regard, the Erysichthon episode typifies Ovid’s narrative technique in most stories of the Metamorphoses. The initial tone of the description suggests serious­ ness. Ovid leads, or rather misleads, us into the story by making it appear at first to be a pendant to the story of Philemon and Baucis (8.616-724), whose piety was rewarded by the gods. Erysichthon is not a rash and unconcerned lad whose wish to build a banquet hall gets the better of any other considerations. Instead, he is a grown man qui numina divum sperneret—a contemptor divum, whom Vergil had portrayed so memorably as a type of human behavior in the person of Mezentius. The story of Philemon and Baucis had been told in response to the blasphemous remarks of precisely such a deorum spretor (8.612-613). Erysichthon is the very incarnation of wickedness, and his actions spring from his evil intentions. The subsequent description of the grove matches in tone the gravity of this conception of Erysichthon’s character. The sacred­ ness of the place does not admit of nymphs "sporting at noontide” as in Callimachus’s hymn (line 38). Instead, the nymphs lead fes­ tive choruses that are part of a religious rite (8.746-748). And whereas Callimachus simply speaks of a large poplar, Ovid describes an oak in terms deliberately reminiscent of a famous simile in Aeneid IV (441-446). This oak not only is huge—it towers above the other trees as these trees tower above the grass—but also is a rustic shrine in the agricultural tradition of Roman religion. Votive tablets and wreaths received by grateful supplicants hang from it. Not only does Ovid expand and change whatever he found in Calli­ machus’s incidental description, a description that took up all of two lines (37-38), but also he evokes the numinous, an aspect of the Roman tradition that Vergil so brilliantly integrated into his epic. In this respect Ovid invests the myth with realities familiar to his readers. Ovid’s characterization of Erysichthon continues in its original vein. He is impious (761), he commits a nefas (766) and a soelus

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(765) at which his companions are aghast (765: obstipuere omnes, which is another Vergilian echo), and he kills one of them with mocking words about the mans piety (767). The only sly note in the whole account is that Ovid’s Erysichthon seems to know Calli­ machus’s Hymn, as might be expected, for he says that, even if the goddess herself appeared to him, she could not stop him (755756). But then the scene and the tone change, as Ovid again ex­ pands what occupies just one line in Callimachus’s hymn. There Demeter perceives that her holy tree is in pain (line 40), whereas Ovid describes in detail a procession of the nymphs to Ceres and their reception by the goddess. The passage (8.777-787) is a good example of Ovid’s penchant for visualizing and painting a scene,5 but it results in a break in the serious tone that Ovid has maintained up to this point. Ovid has built up the serious tone to a degree that surpasses its role in Callimachus’s version, only to deflate it now. The deflation is gradual, and the scene of the procession of the nymphs serves as a transition. Everything is reduced to protocol: the nymphs, like Mediterranean wailing women, are properly attired in black, and Ceres, far from being a gigantic deity—for Ovid makes it a point to humanize even the appearance of the gods—is adorned with the attributes and the headdress we know from Roman art. Most im­ portantly, even the matter of Erysichthon’s punishment becomes a question of etiquette. In Callimachus’s hymn, this punishment was suggested easily enough by Erysichthons desire for banqueting. Ovid, by contrast, motivates it with the universal opposition be­ tween Hunger and Ceres, the goddess of plenty. But he only sug­ gests this cosmic idea and does not develop it. What matters is that it would be against all protocol for Ceres to go to Hunger, and thus she has to send one of the nymphs. At this point the next tableau begins (788-813). It is developed in its own right and none of its detail is necessary for the main story. After Ovid had infused the story with contemporary reality through descriptions of the grove in Roman religious terms, he now transposes us to the world of the wondrous and fantastic. And he will continue in the same grotesque and fantastic vein without ever 5 Several scholars have rightly considered this tendency as one of the charac­ teristics of the Metamorphoses. See, for example, Walther Kraus’s survey article “Ovidius Naso” in Ovid, pp. 118-119.

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returning to the realities of the early part of the stoiy. First Ovid gives us a general description of the habitat of Hunger (a descrip­ tion, incidentally, that is strangely prophetic of the locale of his exile),6 and then he follows it up with presenting a personifica­ tion of Hunger. Here he pulls all the stops and presents us with the sort of graphic and grotesque detail that we know from allegories in Renaissance art (799-808): quaesitamque Famem lapidoso vidit in agro unguibus et raras vellentem dentibus herbas. hirtus erat crinis, cava lumina, pallor in ore, labra incana situ, scabrae rubigine fauces, dura cutis, per quam spectari viscera possent; ossa sub incurvis exstabant arida lumbis, ventris erat pro ventre locus; pendere putares pectus et a spinae tantummodo crate teneri. auxerat articulos macies, genuumque tumebat orbis, et inmodico prodibant tubere tali. [She looked for Famine And found her, in a stony field, her nails Digging the scanty grass, and her teeth gnawing The tundra moss. Her hair hung down all matted. Her face was ghastly pale, her eyes were hollow, Lips without color, the throat rough and scaly, The skin so tight the entrails could be seen, The hip-bones bulging at the loins, the belly Concave, only the place for a belly, really, And the breasts seemed to dangle, held up, barely, By a spine like a stick-figure’s; and her thinness Made all her joints seem large; the knees were swollen Balloons, almost, the ankles lumpy tubers.] It is entirely understandable that the poor messenger nymph should get hungry at the mere sight of this. She speeds back to Ceres, but we proceed on with Hunger to the next tableau, which describes