PREFACE TO THE PRESENT EDITION

by Antonie Wlosok

In 1903, when Richard Heinze's Virgils epische Technik first appeared, the poet's reputation was at a very low ebb. It had begun to sink in the eighteenth century, in the wake of the aesthetic concept of the 'genius', and declined even more rapidly in the nineteenth century. Works of reference and encyclopaedias, particularly in Germany, repeated the dismissive judgement that the Aeneid was merely the product of a clumsy and uninspired attempt to imitate Homer (and other poets).^[1] It was generally felt that the writer of an epic that was so obviously derived from Greek models did not even deserve to be called a poet. In the eyes of such critics, the Aeneid lacked everything that prevailing opinion considered essential for true poetry: originality of poetic creation, spontaneity of emotion, liveliness, and a vivid and graphic representation of events. It was widely believed that Virgil was a writer who simply copied from his sources and had no artistic views of his own, but had merely cobbled together material from here, there and everywhere, with no overall plan, so that the final product could not even be regarded as an integral whole. Amongst classicists it was fashionable to draw attention to contradictions, inconsistencies, awkwardness, weaknesses and errors.^[2]

It was against this background that Heinze's book raised the whole question of Virgil's artistic aims and his own individual achievement in relation to his literary predecessors and his sources. This approach to the question gave new direction to the study of Virgil; it also inaugurated a whole new era of Latin studies, which at that time were concerned almost exclusively with source-criticism (Quellenforschung ). We might even go so far as to say that with this work Heinze was the first scholar to establish the study of Latin literature as a separate branch of literary criticism, conscious of its own special function within the field of classical scholarship.^[3]

Heinze's method of research remains exemplary even today. By means of painstaking analysis of the whole poem^[4] and patient interpretation of the text, constantly drawing comparisons with Virgil's model, Homer, and avoiding all value-judgements, Heinze skilfully pursued one central question: what were Virgil's intentions, and how did he achieve them?

By this method, Heinze succeeded in proving convincingly that Virgil followed clear ideas and effective artistic principles in the selection and shaping of his material, and that he created an epic style that was very much his own, characterized above all by its dramatic, ethical and emotional nature. By 'emotion' we mean that the feelings of the chief characters, both in their actions and in their sufferings, are brought to the forefront of Virgil's narrative, and that he often subordinates the description of external events and situations to the expression of emotional processes, states or moods.

It was Heinze himself who later, in a lecture delivered in 1918,^[5] singled out 'the warmth and insight of its emotions' as the most important human quality of the Aeneid , and summed up the essential quality of Virgil's descriptive method thus: 'Virgil tells his story like a dramatist, and he portrays the emotions like a painter'; and this portrayal is not merely the result of perceptive observation, but involves entering into the very soul of his characters and showing us how things look from their point of view. Today we can see that in making observations of this kind, Heinze anticipated by many years modern methods of research into narrative.

Furthermore, his book also immediately stimulated scholars to undertake further research into the techniques of narrative and imitation. In particular, within the field of Virgilian scholarship, numerous studies on the theme of 'the art of Virgil' began to appear.^[6] Before long, scholars also extended their investigations into areas that Heinze had chosen not to tackle when he restricted his study to Virgil's poetic 'technique', as he called it; they began to reveal the large number of echoes, correspondences and cross-references within the Aeneid , and, last but not least, the symbolic nature of Virgilian poetry.^[7] Finally, Heinze's fresh approach to the author's artistic intentions – which required a readiness to understand such intentions – prepared the way for a veritable blossoming of interpretations of Virgil that concentrated on the proper understanding of the poet's text.

The significance of Heinze's book was immediately recognized by the academic world,^[8] although, of course, classicists who were committed to the opposite way of thinking did not approve of it.^[9] Friedrich Leo declared that it was the best thing yet written about Virgil.^[10] A second edition (1908) was soon published, and then a third (1915), in which Heinze expanded some discussions and made a number of corrections. Its true value was appreciated in numerous reviews, and in tributes to Heinze at the time of his death,^[11] and the majority of its conclusions accepted. Many are now commonplaces of Virgilian scholarship.

The two ideas that won the least acceptance were, first, the theory that Virgil composed the individual books of the Aeneid as self-contained poems intended for separate performance, and, secondly, Heinze's views on the relative chronology of the books. Equally controversial was his view that Aeneas' character underwent a development in the course of the work, in the sense of a gradual approach towards perfection and towards the Roman Stoic ideal that Heinze believed Aeneas to represent.^[12] He firmly maintained this view even in the third edition of his book, in which he adduced further evidence to support it. Amongst its most influential adherents were C.M. Bowra^[13] and K. Büchner,^[14] and even today it has still not been totally refuted.

In later years, when further progress had been made in the study of Virgil's art, certain limitations in Heinze's work became apparent.^[15] They arose from the fact that he had decided to restrict his study to Virgil's epic technique – in other words, to those principles which could be clearly established as guiding the way in which Virgil shaped his material, as opposed to, for example, the symbolic or ambivalent aspects of his poem. However, it is precisely this decision that resulted in the much-praised 'masterly clarity and precision' of the book,^[16] and ensured its high standing as a 'classic in criticism'.^[17] Nowadays the art of sound, scholarly literary criticism is all too frequently forgotten; here is a work that will provide an excellent introduction to that art for yet another generation.