5—
Virgil's Aims
1—
Astonishment, Pity and Fear
The aim of poetry as opposed to other verbal arts is to delight, and 'to shake the
reader up', as we say, although Greek aesthetics used a different metaphor: 'to put
the reader beside himself':
soul] and
467 istotelian theory.[1] In tragedy the main weight falls completely on
since the aestheticians – since Aristotle, and even before his time – did not discrimi-
nate between epic and tragedy, this also held good for the epic. In itself
[to excite, produce an emotional response] did not perhaps have to be bound up with
the idea of violent excitement; serene beauty can also move the spirit very deeply.
But one does not generally think of the word as embracing this possibility: one takes
it to mean what had been established ever since Euripides as the specific effect of
tragedy: the 'emotional, unexpected and surprising', or, as Plutarch once para-
phrased it, 'the upsetting and amazing',[2] or, to let Virgil's friend Horace have a
word, it is the art of one qui pectus inaniter angit , inritat , mulcet , falsis terroribus
implet [who torments my heart with illusions, grates, soothes, and fills with feigned
terrors] (Ep . 2.1.211-12): a definition in which only mulcere [soothing] allows any
small space for the gentler effects which are necessary for variety and recuperation.
That certain basic aspects of Virgil's technique are decisively geared towards this
goal is very obvious. In the present study of his epic technique, almost everything
which we have had to label 'a dramatic touch' serves
attempting to rival the dramatist in arousing excitement, and therefore studies the
secrets of his art. This can be felt most clearly in the structuring of the action: the
striving after energetic forward movement, the strong emphasis on decisive mo-
ments, the stage-like structure of the smaller units, the preference of peripeteia
[reversal] to a calmer, regular course, the struggle after surprising effects, the harsh
light focussed on particular details by means of contrasts and climaxes – these are
468 all characteristic of Virgil, and they are all borrowed from the dramatist's box of
tricks. I do not need to go further with this (and related aspects) again here; but there
is a wider field which does require special attention.
At the centre of his theory of the effect of tragedy, Aristotle placed
and fear, which the poet must arouse in the audience.
regarded as the core of
more and more; it became one of the highest aims of Virgilian epic too. There are
two ways of achieving this aim: either by narrating events which arouse pity, anger,
fear etc. in the audience; or by presenting the characters to us in an emotional state:
the more vividly and visually this is done, the more easily we will identify with the
character and share the depicted emotion, and, although much less intensely,
description not only of the exciting event but also of its effect on the participants:
Virgil preferred this second, surer way.
The most noble tragic emotion, pity, also ranks highest in Virgil. For example, in
Book 1 he is not satisfied with merely emphasizing the piteous aspects of the fate of
Aeneas and the Trojans: episodic material, such as the narrative about Dido (above
p. 107 n. 7), the images in the temple at Carthage (above, p. 312f.) and the dialogue
between Venus and Amor, becomes an extra source of pity. In the Sack of Troy,
emphasis is laid on the piteous aspects of Hector's dream-appearance, the rape of
Cassandra and the death of Priam; with the prodigium at the grave of Polydorus, the
meeting with Andromache, the adventure with the Cyclops, where it would have
been easy to concentrate on different emotions, the poet still appeals primarily to our
pity. The sight of any suffering, such as that of a tortured animal or an invalid in
pain, can awaken similar feelings of suffering in the onlooker; these feelings are
intensified if they are combined with anger at the perpetrator of the suffering. This
association of the
469 by the aestheticians, and turned to advantage in rhetoric.[3] Thus the
someness] of Neoptolemus' coarse cruelty and arrogance is an additional factor
which increases our pity for Priam and Andromache; Sinon's perfidy, Pygmalion's
criminal tryanny are painted in the blackest of colours in order to make us feel the
fate of their victims more bitterly; even Juno's implacable hatred belongs in this
category. At the same time, it may sometimes be merely the common pity of a
tender heart; the whole person feels involved when not only his pity but also his love
and admiration are directed towards the sufferer; it is only then that he really reaches
the point of identifying with him. What led Virgil in the first place to ennoble his
suffering characters in this way was probably his impulse to sympathize fully with
them himself; but it is obvious how close this brings him to the requirement for the
character of the tragic hero which Aristotle abstracted from Attic tragedy. It is this
above all which distinguishes Dido from the suffering heroines of the most recent
examples of pathetic narrative, that she not only appeals to other humans as a human
being, but also, as a great-hearted and powerful yet feminine and gentle princess,
she has won the admiration of the audience before it is time to win their pity. And
Virgil does exactly the same whenever possible, even with figures in episodes: when
we see Priam fall, we are not only touched by the disgraceful end of an old man: we
have seen him face the enemy Sinon with courage, have admired the old man's
heroic spirit, and are finally reminded that this poor unfortunate, whose corpse is not
even granted a resting-place, was once the powerful ruler of Asia. Andromache's
loyalty to her first husband, Palinurus' faithful care of his master, Euryalus' noble
ambition and Nisus' faithful love for his friend, Lausus' sacrifice for his father –
those are all features which make the poet's own creations really worthy of his pity
470 in their suffering: they are also, one may add, the features which have continued to
make these scenes of pathos effective through all the centuries since. Closely related
to what we have just said is Virgil's treatment of the guilt which leads men to
destruction. Hellenistic poetry had wallowed more and more in presenting crimes de
passion , thereby seeking out the unnatural rather than avoiding it, in the belief that
this would add to the pathetic effect. Virgil does allow past crimes to be mentioned,
but he himself does not present them; how far removed is something like Dido's
other cases it is a question of lesser failings: Camilla, Nisus and Euryalus become
the victims of their imprudent desires; the immoderate boldness of Pallas can hardly
count as a failing; and in the case of the stupidity of the Trojans who pull their own
destruction into the city, there can be no talk of tragic guilt. Here mankind faces the
unfathomable decision of Fate, which also makes the innocent suffer; the poet
knows the final purposes served by the fall of Troy and the wanderings of Aeneas:
tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem [such was the cost in heavy toil of
beginning the life of Rome]; and it is just this glimpse of the future which prevents
our justified pity from sinking to the agony of one condemned to watch the un-
necessary and purposeless suffering of his fellow men.
For centuries, the Aeneid has been the paradigm of dramatic style in poetic
narrative. To the question whether Virgil should be regarded as the actual creator of
this style, a definite answer can hardly be given. This much is certain, that among
the surviving monuments of Hellenistic poetry there is not one single poem which
could lay claim to having been Virgil's model in every respect, or even in every
important respect. To be sure, we have been able to draw attention to many minor
points of comparison in Hellenistic literature, both earlier and later; but when Virgil
copies Apollonius in one respect, and in another copies the originals of the Wedding
of Peleus or the Ciris , it only highlights how different his aims are; Apollonius is
totally lacking in the essential element, the dramatic character of the narrative; the
471 later, extremely mannered epyllion, almost perverse in its composition, is the dia-
metrical opposite of the Virgilian epic, which aims at a unified, harmonious effect;
their treatment of the action cannot be compared in any way, since the fragmentary,
arbitrary nature of the epyllion prevents us from speaking of a real story-line. As for
the earlier short narrative poems of Hellenistic times, Virgil clearly did learn from
them, above all in the very polished form of presentation, in the
the narrative, and possibly also in the striving for a unified effect; but for the rest,
once again, their aims are as different as can be: they strive after ingenious enliven-
ment of the detail and a noble restraint in line and colour; his aims are a simple
greatness, strong emotions, tension, excitement – in short, the
[astonishing].
There is another genre of polished narrative which may have come closer to
Virgilian technique than anything mentioned so far: Hellenistic – or, more precisely,
Peripatetic – historiography. Both Virgilian epic and the historiography of Duris and
Phylarchus are really based on one and the same theory: the Aristotelian theory of
tragedy.[4] The character of these histories is shown (even more clearly than by the
surviving fragments) by Polybius in his famous critique of Phylarchus (2.56ff.); he
says that the latter's main aim was to arouse the reader and to produce pity and
anger; it is to this end that each shocking peripeteia [reversal] is presented as vividly
as possible:
aesthetic tendency. However, it will hardly have stopped at the crudely
472 assume that skilful dramatic technique was widely used both to refine and to inten-
sify the effects.[5] From this school of historiographers came the narrative-artists,
masters in their own field, to whom we are indebted for the stories of Camillus and
Coriolanus, and the conquest of Veii, to mention only a few: I do not believe that
ancient narrative includes anything which comes closer in technique to Virgilian
epic. They have the same concentration of interest, the composition of effective
dramatic scenes, powerful peripeteia [reversal], careful psychological motivation,
even the technique of imitation, borrowing the external structure of the action from
ancient poetry or history: I need only remind you of the captured haruspex [sooth -
sayer], who divulges Fate's precondition for victory at Veii, as Helenus did at Troy.[6]
Of the theory itself (the development of which probably stems from Theophrastus),
very little survives;[7] but the theory on which Dionysius bases his criticism of Thu-
cydides comes surprisingly close to what we have deduced to have been Virgil's
artistic principles: we have there the requirement of unity and clearly-organized
action (de Thuc . 5.6), continuity[8] and symmetry (ibid. 13, see above p. 332 n. 4) in
the narrative, the right choice of beginning and ending,[9] pathetic effect,[10] and
appropriate use of direct speech at highpoints of the narrative (17ff.)
473 We know next to nothing about the artistic form of the historical epic of the
Hellenistic period; whether, and to what extent, it made use of the technique de-
veloped by the historiographers, which would have provided Virgil with even closer
models, cannot be established. The little that we are able to deduce about the
(Hellenistic) epic about which most is known, the Messeniaca of Rhianus, makes it
probable that they did not lack excitement and tension and dramatic movement; but
that is not sufficient to tell us anything about their presentation and composition.
Nor does what we know of Ennius' Annales from testimonia and fragments justify
us in supposing that Virgil learnt about epic technique from him as he did about
poetic speech. We can at least say one negative thing, that both the choice of
material and the lay-out in the form of annals allow us to deduce that Ennius
remained completely unaffected by the aesthetic theory which underlies Virgil's
technique of composition.
2—
Moral Purpose
In the previous section we have touched on aims which no longer belong to the
realm of aesthetics, but to the realm of morals and religion, which for Virgil were
closely linked with politics and patriotism. To have a didactic, inspiring, elevating
effect in these areas would not strike Virgil as a goal which is basically alien to
poetry and which would be added as a mere accessory to its real artistic purpose; on
the contrary, it is a basic part of his concept of being a poet that the vates should also
be the teacher and educator of his nation. What I have said so far about character
and action, about the gcds and the relationship of man to fatum , is enough to show
that the Aeneid is firmly rooted in a unified Weltanschauung ; every poem in which
this is the case is also propaganda for the poet's attitudes, whether he himself
intends this or not. The only difference lies in whether the poet is more interested in
474 the discovery of truths about life, or in their practical consequences. Virgil would
not have been a Roman if he had not valued practical effect above any theoretical
insight; he values the Stoic teaching of morals and religion not as an explanation of
the world which satisfies ones hunger for knowledge, but as a guide to right beha-
viour. It is enough to read Virgil's account of the Underworld after the Homeric one
to appreciate the distance between poetry with a purpose and naïve poetry;[11] how
out of place the cry of that Virgilian sufferer: discite iustitiam moniti et non temnere
divos (6.620) [be warned, learn righteousness; and learn to scorn no god], would be
in Homer's Tartarus. Hardly anywhere else does Virgil express so directly what he
wants to commend to the hearts of his audience; he himself does not preach, he
leaves the task to the story which he is telling, and it is only the well-organized and
deliberate progress of the story which shows us how intently he is working towards
this goal.
In this respect, Virgil breaks completely with the habits of his recent past. As far
as we can tell, nothing had been farther from Hellenistic poetry than to serve a
Weltanschauung in order to influence the lifestyle of its public. Poetry with a
purpose existed in plenty, but the purpose always had a political and personal point:
the panegyric in its manifold forms serves the glorification of a man, of a race, of a
city, also perhaps of a political system; that has nothing to do with what we are
pointing out here in Virgil. Narrative poetry which wished to fulfil serious artistic
requirements stood as far as possible from all that; the only rival here to the purely
artistic was scholarly interest. It was no different in Rome: a Catullus did make use
of verses as a weapon in party politics, but the idea that the highest task of poetry
475 was to educate the nation would have appeared to him and his likeminded compan-
ions as absurd, if not shocking. If one looks in Rome for a predecessor to Virgil,
there is only one, and he himself stood aside from the bustle of literati and poets:
Lucretius, the great loner. Virgil was the heir, not only to his artistic method, but
also to his conception of the nature of the poet's vocation: the Aeneid is a positively
anti-Lucretian work, although it does not provide scientific proof for the truth of its
assertions but lets them come to life in pictures of the prehistory of Rome. Virgil no
longer stood alone in his aims; he was supported by the trends of the Augustan
epoch which aimed at moral improvement. The cura morum [moral concern] of
Augustus is all too often regarded as a personal whim of the ruler; we overlook the
fact that this effort from above will have been matched by a strong movement from
below, which must have been given its initial impetus in the last years of the
Republic. The renaissance of the popular philosophy of the Cynics and Stoics must
fall within this period, even if its main blossoming came later; but Crispinuses and
Stertiniuses did live and teach in Rome, and had their following which took them
seriously because they themselves were serious. This class of man was obviously
very common, but we know of it only from the caricatures of Horace, who for his
part was, here too, going back to classical writers, above all Bion, as models; but his
diatribes are to be understood as only the refined reflection of a strongly moralizing
movement which had taken hold of the nation, the lower classes perhaps more than
the educated. The linking of morals with patriotism, the attempt to find moral
models not in the ideals of the philosophical schools but in the heroic, courageous
and pious prehistory of Rome, was also taken up enthusiastically and given great
encouragement by Augustus, but he did not begin it: this is clear from the writings
of Varro's old age. Thus it cannot be explained as simple compliance with the
ruler's wishes when the historiography of this period, more than ever before, places
476 the moral purpose unanimously and decisively to the fore.[12] Previously, except for
satisfying the hunger for knowledge and also certain artistic requirements, the
historian had probably followed political aims, wishing to provide the statesman
with practical and moral guidance, or to provide men with something to hold on to
in those stormy times;[13] now history wishes, above all, to improve the man rather
than the politician, by presenting him with examples to emulate or avoid. We know
what great weight Augustus attached to these very exempla maiorum [ancestral
precedents]; it is no wonder if not just history but also poetry becomes a schoolmis-
tress, thereby striving anew after an importance which it had renounced for several
477 centuries.[14] Now, Horace reads 'Father Homer' in the same way as the Cynics once
did, in the nationalistic spirit of their time, as a most impressive teacher of morals;
and he praises poetry because it recte facta refert , orientia tempora notis instruit
exemplis [recounts good actions and teaches the rising generation with well-known
examples] ( Epist . 2.1 130), certain that he is thereby expressing Augustus' own
conviction; the Aeneid may have hovered in his mind as a shining example while he
wrote this: it is as an exemplum – though the word itself may be absent – that
Aeneas holds himself up to Ascanius (12.439), and the whole poem is the richest
mine of exempla maiorum [examples from our ancestors] which Augustus could
wish for: he himself stands, as the noblest example, at the centre of the long line of
Roman heroes who are shown to Aeneas in the Underworld, just as Augustus
displayed their statues to the Roman people in his Forum.
3—
Scholarly Material
About the national and Augustan tendency, which is closely related to the moral and
religious tendency which I have just discussed, nothing more specific needs to be
said here; the material content of these tendencies lies outside my field, and I am
able to refer you on this matter to Norden's essay, which I have already cited several
478 times. At this point I will merely remind you how closely related the national epic of
Rome is to the national history of Rome in this respect: we have seen how extremely
important it is, in Virgil's reshaping of the Sack of Troy, for example, that he
regarded it as part of the ancient history of Rome; there are parallels in Roman
historians with which we could illuminate many aspects of Virgil's selection (or
invention) of material: Virgil treads the same paths which the annalists of Rome had
always trod, whether they were writing prose or poetry. For our purpose it is
significant that this tendency caused Virgil to give a completely new face to an
important part of Hellenistic poetry: historial scholarship. The Aeneid contains it in
plenty; Virgil has drawn freely on what the Roman antiquarians as far as Varro have
handed down about Italian, and particularly Roman, history, about the history of
races and cities, about constitutions, wars and the worship of the gods. At first
glance that might seem to resemble the scholarship of which so much is evident in
Apollonius' epic: there, too, there is a rich store of the results of aetiological,
geographic and mythographic research. On looking more closely, one perceives the
great difference between the two poets and their scholarship. Apollonius pursues
truly scholarly interests: he is writing for a public who found the saga valuable and
interesting primarily because it provided information about historical events and the
conditions of earliest times, about the geography of distant, little-known lands, and
about the ancestry of famous families; although a great part of it is really pretentious
pseudo-scholarship, at least its basis was a genuine scholarly desire to have a
historical understanding of the present. It is true that the alliance forged here be-
tween scholarship and poetry is a most unhappy union which is unfair to both
parties. They stand together as strangers, unattached; there is no attempt to trans-
form learning into poetry, i.e. to produce an emotional effect from it, and at every
turn the flight of fancy is weighed down by the historical ballast; at the same time,
the poetic form, however badly treated, predominates sufficiently to make it im-
possible for the material to be presented exhaustively for discussion, i.e. for
479 scholarly use to be made of it. Virgil's purposes were totally different: by including
historical material in his poem he was not appealing to the learned interests of his
audience, but to their patriotic feelings, and although the effect thus striven after can
hardly count as purely poetic, it does come considerably closer to being so because
its effect is on the emotions. Virgil was writing with a view to catching the interest
not merely of the city of Rome, but of the whole of Italy,[15] and every mention of a
city or of a race which confirmed their claim to extreme antiquity must have brought
him enthusiastic gratitude from their descendants; imagine, for example, how Man-
tua must have resounded with the lines in which the poet honours his own native
city (10.198-203). Virgil does not restrict himself to ancient history: the Parade of
Heroes and the description of the shield lead the audience through the time of the
kings and the feats of the Republic, right up to the heights of the present time: it is
quite clear that his aim here is to edify and to elevate, rather than to instruct. Virgil
possibly considered something else more important than the historical data: the
depiction of the mores maiorum [customs of our ancestors], particularly the customs
associated with the worship of the gods. The learned scholarship displayed in doing
this deserves the recognition which was already heaped on it by the ancient critics;
but if this led later generations to treat the Aeneid as a mine of ancient wisdom, it
had an even greater significance in this role for Virgil's contemporaries; their inter-
est in such matters was not merely scholarly and retrospective but extremely
practical and relevant: there was a great desire not merely to know about these
mores maiorum but to re-establish them in a pure form, to bring old, dead customs
back to life; the ancient life-style was regarded as a moral and religious ideal, and
their attempts to restore the same conditions, attempts that might appear superficial
and hollow at first glance, with no hope of success in reality, did spring from the
same roots as the enthusiasm for moral atonement and purification mentioned
above. Thus when Virgil supplied details of early Italian rites and cult formulae,
they were not learned curiosities but evidence of happier days which deserved
respect and were hallowed by age. Here, too, the poet is concerned with the feelings
of his audience, not with their hunger for information.
480 In Apollonius, the learned details are not fully incorporated, as can even be seen
from the form; their connection with the poetic content (the winning of the Golden
Fleece and the abduction of Medea) is not organic, and this is reflected in the way in
which they are introduced; the poet speaks frequently in his own person, adding
learned explanations or emphasizing that a name, a monument or a custom, etc.
survives to the present day. We have seen above (p. 297) how rarely Virgil speaks in
his own person in that way: he makes an effort to incorporate scholarly material in a
way which makes it seem essential to the action. For important parts of the early
history of Italy, the two catalogues in Books 7 and 10 provided a welcome oppor-
tunity to do this; in other cases, the poet makes his characters tell of past happenings
(p. 307 above), taking care that the reason for it arises perfectly naturally from the
story, by having another character who needs to be told about the relevant circum-
stances. It is only very rarely that he lets himself be carried away by scholarly
interest over and above what is required by the plot,[16] mostly in giving the etymo-
logy of names; also the periegeses [descriptions] of the coast of South Italy and
Sicily which Aeneas gives (3.551ff., 692ff.) are not really sufficiently motivated by
the situation in such detail: but compared with the geographical sections of Apollo-
nius their brevity, and the limitation of purely scholarly information, is striking.
481 Giving purely geographical information about areas which were unfamiliar to edu-
cated Romans is avoided by Virgil completely; we have seen how the omission of
facts of purely scholarly interest even led to confusion, e.g. about the site of the
foundation of the city in Thrace (p. 90 n. 34 above). But we do know that even
educated Romans had little interest in geography, and therefore little knowledge of
it; Virgil presupposes in his audience much more extensive knowledge of myth-
ographical matters, although he does not parade his own scholarship or include
recondite facts for the purpose of instruction.
4—
The Sublime
We return to the purely aesthetic aims of the poem. What we assembled under the
heading
Virgil was striving: alongside it, or above it, comes his striving for the
sublime. This is certainly more than a certain solemnity of diction, such as had long
been de rigueur in rhetoric and poetry for treating certain sublime matters; nor is it
the same as the concept of 'seemliness' (
role in Hellenistic poetics, but had little effect on the epic other than the negative
requirement that it should avoid anything which detracted from heroic dignity.
Rather, the sublime is a thoroughly positive aesthetic quality, permeating both con-
tent and form, an aspect of 'style' in its widest sense. We need not hesitate to
include it in a description of poetic technique, since Virgil was certainly striving for
it deliberately; it is not, as it is in Aeschylus, say, or, in a different form, in Schiller,
an integral part of his poetic personality: the Eclogues alone, written when Virgil
was already mature, are sufficient proof that
come naturally to him; nothing has changed, in spite of the very considerable
transformation which his Weltanschauung had undergone in the intervening period.
In spite of this, one does not have the impression that the sublimity in the Aeneid is
'manufactured' in order to conjure up feelings in the reader which do not fill the
482 poet's own heart and mind; also, it would certainly be wrong to look for deliberate
calculation in every instance; it is rather that Virgil himself felt transported to a
higher sphere by the story which he had undertaken to treat, and this mood made
him try to create in his poem an ideal of the sublime such as he had built up for
himself while being carried along on the currents of his time. The result was a work
of art with a completely unified atmosphere, something which made it stand out
from earlier and later poems which otherwise had similar artistic aims. Even less
than for other areas of technique can an examination of details here be a substitute
for the total impression which one can gain only by reading the work for oneself; but
we must attempt to establish a kind of standard type of the sublime.
Homer's Hephaestus is a grimy smith of supernatural skill, who sweats at the
bellows himself, and when important visitors are expected, lays his tools tidily in
their box, has a wash and puts on a clean shirt; Virgil's Vulcan is the god who rules
the fire, served by the powerful Cyclopes, and who, when armour needs to be forged
for Aeneas, does not turn his own hand to it but orders his slaves to set to work. This
is a typical example of the difference between the world of the gods in Homer and in
Virgil. Homer's gods are men, except that the bounds of their physical limitations
have been extended or removed; Virgil's gods are the supreme powers which rule
the universe, who have taken on human form only because they cannot otherwise be
made visible. In this form, as active characters in a poem, it is true that they are
liable to a certain degree of human frailty: but only precisely as much as is essential
for the story, and never in a way that appears petty. Thus their Olympian life-style
has little of the earthy about it: they do not sit feasting and drinking and playing the
lyre and laughing uproariously; they do not bicker, if they do argue it is in passion-
ate but well-chosen words; they do not threaten each other with insults and jeers,
they do not attack and wound each other and therefore do not need to weep with
483 anger or roar with pain. The way in which they intervene in earthly matters matches
this. No Virgilian god meets a mortal in battle; even at the destruction of Ilium, in
which they have a hand, they are not among the combatants. They do not concern
themselves with minor matters: it is beneath their dignity to intervene in the Games,
and Cloanthus' ship is brought to the finishing-line not by Neptune but by a host of
subordinate maritime spirits. When help is needed, they come to their favourites in
person: in this way Venus reveals herself to her son, Apollo comes to warn Asca-
nius, Mercury to warn Aeneas. When they wish to do harm, they do not dirty their
own hands: Juno has Aeolus raise the tempest, Allecto raise the war, Juturna break
the treaty; Diana gives bow and arrow to her nymph to execute the sentence on
Camilla's murderer, Neptune lets Palinurus be pushed into the sea by the god of
sleep, although he himself personally opens the Syrtes with his trident in order to
rescue Aeneas. Minerva would certainly not behave like Homer's Athena, who
delivers Hector to his doom with a shameful deception:[17] when Juno deceives
Turnus with a mirage it is in order to rescue him. As with the ignoble, so they are
also kept far from anything teasing or jocular. The scenes in the Olympian nurseries
and living-rooms in Hellenistic poetry were the exact opposite of the sublime: when
Apollonius has Aphrodite receiving two visiting goddesses as a middle-class house-
wife would receive two slightly more distinguished friends, and complaining about
her mischievous rogue of a son and afterwards finding him when he has just beaten
poor Ganymede at knucklebones, Virgil will not have understood how Apollonius
could so parody divine matters in an epic. However, his Venus does not display total
divine sublimity: love, even in its highest forms, cannot be thought of as always
serious. Venus does not behave to her son as gods usually do to mortals; she is freer,
one might almost say flirtatious. She laughs with pleasure at the successful ruse,
when she anticipates the ruin of Juno's evil plan (4.128), she also weeps, and the
king of the gods smiles at her groundless fears (1.228). In her, the personification of
484 love, the sensual aspect of love may also have its due: with her charm she entangles
her husband, as Homer said that the proud queen of the gods does, although sensual
love does not inflame her, the guardian of marriage (1.73; 4.126).
Thus far, the Virgilian world of the gods would satisfy the severest requirements
about avoiding
positively in its working: where it proclaims itself,[18] Nature shudders; it is not
however in the wild disturbance of the elements but in its greatest calm that the poet
finds the divine to be most solemn: Neptune does not stir up the sea with his trident
but calms the waves and chases away the clouds so that the pure blue sky shines
over the motionless water (1.142; 5.820); when Jupiter begins to speak, 'the high
house of the gods is dumb, the earth quakes and is silent, silent the sky, the wind
dies down and the sea levels its waves to a calm' (10.100). The effect of the divine
on the human spirit is equally sublime: each time that a human suspects the presence
of the divine (8.349), or hears a divine voice (3.93; 9.112) or the divinity even
comes bodily to him (p. 256 above), he is seized by the fear of supernatural power,
and is shattered to the depth of his being.
Virgil intensifies the uncanny and horrific aspect of supernatural power, making
it frightful and sublime: he mitigates the horror of the appearance of the Harpies
with two lines which place these scourges of the gods in the realm of hellish
monsters (p. 84 above); the terrifying figures of the Underworld are made both more
intense and more sublime: Cerberus immania terga resolvit fusus humi totoque
ingens extenditur antro (6.422) [relaxing his giant back he sprawled all his length
across the floor of the cave]; the fiery eyes of old Charon (300) are a feature which
banishes any thought of a Lucianic peasant ferryman; the Underworld itself, as
conceived by Virgil, consists of 'the silent fields of the night', the 'hollow house and
empty realm of Dis': Schiller felt how the intensification of horror here strives for
sublimity.[19]
485 The sublimity of the gods is reflected in that of the heroes.[20] In Virgil's world of
heroes there is no room for anything mean or petty. That great kings might quarrel
486 over the possession of slave-girls, that a king's son like Paris might leave the
fighting in order to carry on a love-affair – Virgil would not have believed his
heroes capable of anything like this. The crooked, bad-tempered, brawling Thersites
changes into Drances the demagogue, driven on, it is true, by envy of Turnus' fame,
but standing up for the justified interests of the crowd against Turnus' destructive
whims, a man who, as his behaviour towards Aeneas shows, can still perceive and
respect true greatness. How noble are the reasons which lead the Rutulians to break
the treaty, compared with the selfishness of Pandarus! Even the wicked Mezentius
has something of the 'noble transgressor', and his death is sublime. Dido is driven
along all the labyrinthine ways of passion, but in death, when a person is shown in
his true colours, she finds the sublime words:
Vixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi ,
et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago .
[I have lived my life and finished the course which fortune allotted me. Now my
wraith shall pass in state to the world below]. Finally, the further Aeneas develops
into the perfect hero, the more purely he represents the very type of the sublime. It
goes without saying that Virgil keeps his image free of every mean or petty trait.
However, the conventional and fictitious concept of Roman greatness of soul and
strength of character receives a slap in the face when Virgil says of his hero at his
first appearance (1.92):
487 extemplo Aeneae solvuntur frigore membra ;
ingemit et duplicis tendens ad sidera palmas
talia voce refert .
[Instantly Aeneas felt his limbs give way in a chill of terror, and groaned. Stretching
both hands, palm-upward, to the stars, he cried aloud]. Virgil most certainly gave
very careful consideration to this passage in particular, as also to the words which
Aeneas then speaks. He sees death standing immediately in front of him, he knows
that no human power can help him now: but he may not express any fear of death or
any wish to remain alive, as Achilles ( Iliad 21.273) and Odysseus (Odyssey 5.299)
do in similar situations – that would be as unworthy of the hero here as it would be
when he has achieved sublimity (9.10); he is only allowed to express the wish that
he had fallen below Troy's walls, watched by his own household, as Hector and
Sarpedon and so many other brave men had died.[21] In the same way as Aeneas sighs
at his misfortune here but does not complain – conqueri fortunam adversam , non
lamentari decet [one ought to lament one's ill-fortune but not bewail it] Pacuvius
had said, and thereby pleased the Stoic-minded Cicero ( Tusc . 2.48) – he is allowed
to weep at the sight of Hector dishonoured (2.279) and Pallas killed (11.29, 41), at
the memory of the death of noble friends and heroes (1.459, cf. 465, 470, 485) or at
the affecting departure of Andromache (3.492) tears of pity also befit the hero;[22] but
even when he would be inclined to despair, he must be capable of putting on a show
of cheerfulness if duty demands it (1.208), should not let himself be so carried away
by his own grief that he acts in a way contrary to his great mission (4.448), should,
after he has paid the tribute of grief when it is due, return immediately to active
488 service (11.96); the sublime spirit shows itself not in the suppression of human
emotions, but in overcoming them. Aeneas as lover: it is impossible to think of him
billing and cooing; slanderous Fama speaks of a licentious, idle life: Aeneas builds
the citadel which will one day protect the deadly enemies of his people (4.260).
When it comes to practical details, we find that the same is true of Aeneas and the
other heroes as we found with the gods. Aeneas is permitted to slay the stag on the
Libyan shore, but not, like Odysseus, gut it with his own hands and carry it to the
ships. Also, he does not travel alone like any common wanderer, but has at least the
faithful Achates at his side, who carries his weapon or can announce his arrival
(6.34). It is totally inappropriate to the dignity of a heroic poem to include unnecess-
ary mention of the details of daily life, eating and drinking, sleeping and dressing;
where they are mentioned, there is a special reason for it: someone is asleep when he
sees a dream-vision, the meal symbolizes the return of physical pleasure after deadly
dangers (1.174, 210), or it brings the fulfilment of a fateful prediction: and if in this
and similar cases a detail such as the eating of the tables has to be mentioned, then at
least all the splendour of language is called on, to decorate with words what is
lacking in greatness.[23] It is a different matter with festive occasions (1.637, 723;
3.353; cf. also 5.100); there royal splendour is displayed in spacious halls, one
reclines on purple rugs, dines from silver and golden dishes and drinks from a
bejewelled cup. But even at such moments of leisure the minds of the character are
on noble things: Demodocus could serve up as a trifle for the Phaeacians a frivolous
frolic from Olympian married life; at Queen Dido's court Iopas sings of the wonders
of the universe and explains its mysteries: for Virgil and his contemporaries this is
the sublimest content of song. How Virgil deliberately avoids anything base in these
matters is best shown by the one exception: the visit to Evander is described in
deliberately plain language. There is repeated eating and drinking, the men are
489 pillowed on the grass, Aeneas has the seat of honour, the hornbeam stool covered
with sheepskin; Evander's herd of cattle snorts on the pasture; Aeneas enters the
lowly hut which serves as a guest chamber, a bear-skin covers his couch of leaves;
when sunrise and birdsong wake the king, he puts on tunic and sandals, girds on his
sword, puts a panther-skin round him for a cloak and goes to his visitor, two hounds,
the guardians of his threshold, at his side. All these plain details are the exact
opposite of the sublime: yet they serve it indirectly, for the cosily impoverished
still-life of the Romanae conditor arcis [founder of Rome's citadel] is intended to
make the reader, surrounded as he is by the splendour and the buzzing life of
metropolitan Rome, appreciate the present greatness all the more because of the
contrast.
In what we have said so far about Virgil's presentation of the human characters
there is already much which does not merely avoid
strives positively after the sublime. I do not need to spell out how this dominated
Virgil's moral sphere: virtus , manly behaviour towards both human enemies and the
blows of fate, is the ideal, alongside pietas , which shows itself at its sublimest in
self-sacrifice. As in the case of the gods, Virgil seeks to carry his audience along
with him by describing the effect which ideal humanity has: think of the behaviour
of Aeneas when Dido receives him, of Drances towards Aeneas, of Ascanius to-
wards the daring pair of friends, of Aeneas at Lausus' self-sacrifice – that all serves,
as it were, to show the audience how to feel admiration.
Inward greatness is symbolized by physical size; Virgil sees his heroes as power-
ful figures of great strength; ingens [huge], always one of Virgil's favourite words,[24]
is used again and again of the heroes and their deeds. With this concept of greatness,
Virgil does sometimes become immoderate, which is very rare with him. It can
perhaps by excused by the intentionally mythical character of the boxing-match at
the Funeral Games where the caestus [thongs] with which Entellus will fight are
manufactured from seven huge ox-skins (5.401); but when the boulder which
490 Turnus picks up would not, as in Homer, be too heavy for two men of the present
generation, but could hardly be carried by twelve specially selected men (12.899),
then the intensification is so exaggerated that it misses its mark. When Aeneas and
Turnus prepare for the duel, Latinus feels the sublime power of destiny, which has
led the two huge men from distant parts of the world to meet in battle (12.709): one
can understand this feeling;[25] but to compare Aeneas with Mount Athos, with Mount
Eryx, and finally with the snow-covered Apennines, is asking too much of the
imagination.
The tendency towards the magnificent and the sublime also affects the portrayal
of nature in the Aeneid . The Trojans' landing place in Libya is the equivalent of the
harbour of Phorcys on Ithaca, where the Phaeacians land: the steep promontories on
either side of the harbour have been made by Virgil into mighty cliffs with summits
that reach the sky; instead of the one olive tree throwing a wide shadow, in the
background he has a tall grove, murky and gloomy. No real site is described in
anything like as much detail as Mount Etna, thundering, flame-spitting and mighty
(3.570-82): it also serves in the
sublime in nature (35.4).
There is one source of the sublime which we have not yet mentioned and which,
it is true, does not often come to the surface in Virgil's poem, but is all the stronger
when it does, and its subterranean rumble accompanies the poem from beginning to
end: the greatness of Rome, of the Roman people and of their ruler, of Roman
history and of the Roman empire, the maiestas populi Romani [majesty of the
Roman people]. The thoughts which would be most likely to make a Roman feel the
awe of the sublime were all linked to these ideas: the thought of the strength of
destiny and the will of the gods, guiding the Roman people in such a miraculous
way; the thought, which Virgil's contemporaries also like to use, that from the
smallest of beginnings such gigantic greatness can grow; but also the thought of the
endless toil and sacrifice which has been the price of this greatness: as Livy feels,
491 when he comes to the great wars against the Samnites, Pyrrhus and Carthage:
quanta rerum moles [what mighty efforts]! 'How often the greatest dangers had to
be faced, in order that the empire might reach its present almost unencompassable
size!' (7.29). And it is just this thought which Virgil puts at the beginning, as if to set
the tone which will resound through all the sufferings and dangers that Aeneas will
undergo: tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem [such was the cost in heavy
toil of beginning the life of Rome]. As well as these general sublime feelings there
are also more concrete concepts: the great figures of Roman history whom Aeneas
sees in the Pageant of Heroes, the famous deeds of his descendants, which he
admires on his shield, although he cannot yet understand their significance: such
sublime material was, in Virgil's opinion, more appropriate for the decoration of the
armour of a Roman hero than the colourful scenes of human life in general which
decorated the shield of Achilles. Just as the person of Augustus is the high point in
the pageant of heroes, so the deeds of Augustus crown the images on the shield;
Augustus as prince of peace, wearing the crown of victory, a god on earth, forms the
high point of Jupiter's prophecy, the essential pièce de résistance in the First Book
which paints in glowing colours the tenor of the poem which the poet himself has
expressed in the opening lines in plain words. Just as Augustus is hallowed among
men, so is the Capitol hallowed among all sites on earth: Aeneas still does not guess
at this when he first sees the wooded height, but the sublime future soon proclaims
itself in the pious shudder which the Arcadians feel at the site where Jupiter appears
in the storm-clouds. The sublime concept of infinity is summoned to the aid of these
images: the rule of Lavinium and Alba was limited, Rome's rule will have no limit
to its territory or to its duration (1.278); incluta Roma imperium terris , animos
aequabit Olympo (6.789) [illustrious Rome shall extend her authority to the breadth
of the earth, and her spirit to the height of Olympus]: Virgil's time saw the fulfil-
ment of Anchises' prophecy.
Virgil's highest aim was to arouse a sense of the sublime in his audience; this
defines and limits every other aspect of the poem. Even the
[astonishing] is only allowed if it is also
Virgilian colouring. In particular, Virgil's pathos is ruled and directed by this. We
have seen that Virgil did not merely strive to arouse pity by any available means; he
492 scorned anything depressing or merely worrying or melancholy-making and restricts
himself almost entirely to the portrayal of heroic suffering which will not just be a
source of pleasurable pain to the onlooker but will also inspire him. He also scorns
anything revolting, common or unpleasant, the
the sublimely terrible. Finally, Virgil's striving after the sublime is also the key to
the complete understanding of Virgil's presentation and composition. Great, unclut-
tered contours, organization and clarity on both the small scale and the larger scale,
a tight structure, omission of all superfluous detail which might distract the gaze and
spoil the unified effect – these were the principles which, as we have seen, rule both
presentation and composition; they beget the form which is the only one worthy of
the sublime material.
The Romans were receptive to the sublime, in Virgil's sense, as no other people
were. They possessed a strongly developed sense of the lowest level of the sublime,
the dignity of outward appearance; the national toga is its most eloquent symbol,
and was felt to be such, as Virgil himself shows when he speaks of the gens togata
(1.282) [the nation which wears the toga]. They also had a great sense of the solemn:
their manner of celebrating festivals, their funerals and triumphal processions bear
witness to this: when Virgil depicts the burial of Misenus, the funeral of Pallas, the
solemn procession when the treaty is agreed, he is providing scenes which are not
only poetically attractive but which most vividly represent the Roman way of think-
ing and feeling. However, it would be quite wrong to think of their thoughts as being
directed only towards outward dignity and outward show. The Roman moral and
religious ideal may have been limited and sober, but none can deny that it contained
an element of the sublime, even if in fact very few Romans in the whole course of
their history ever made this ideal into a reality; that it was created at all is evidence
of their aspirations. Moreover, if the Augustan period and its greatness were a
powerful source of sublime feelings for Virgil, it was doubtless the same, to the
same extent, for his contemporaries. A great wind blows through their times and
dies down all too soon; they breathe in a certain intoxication from the sublime,
493 which infects even such an unsublime nature as Horace; it cannot be mere chance
that it was in Augustan Rome that the concept of the sublime was introduced into
scholarly aesthetics. No-one desired and promoted this movement more than
Augustus himself: countless tiny details still speak to us of how keen he was to
re-establish in the Roman life-style the greatness which it was piously believed to
have possessed in the good old days: Augustus' own statue is itself the most perfect
expression of this, the supreme example of the style. It was the early history of
Rome that Virgil was describing, and this meant that he was describing the ideal of
contemporary Rome; he did not dream up or construct or imitate this ideal, he
experienced it and struggled for it himself; that is why it still lives on for us in his
poem.
466