9—
Simplification
Much more important than the arrangement of sections is the second of the qualities
mentioned above, simplicity. Simplicity and restraint not only make the work easy
to grasp, they also make it great and noble; this is the essential foundation for the
individuality of Virgil's epic style. It is true that this is more easily sensed than
demonstrated, but I must attempt to analyse what produces this impression.
To start with the most elementary: there is restraint in the number of scenes in
each longish section of the action; I am thinking of the Sack of Troy (compared
with, say, Quintus), the Wanderings (compared with, say, Apollonius) or the Games
and battles (compared with Homer). There is restraint in the number of speeches in a
conversation, as we have shown: a single speech and a single reply create a picture
which makes a deeper impression than a long interchange. There is restraint in the
number of conversations: instead of the many ups and downs of the scenes in the
Iliad in which the gods discuss the fate of the warring parties, Virgil has Jupiter's
promise to Venus at the beginning, Juno's renunciation in Jupiter's favour at the
end, and, in between, the great scene in which Venus and Juno meet before Jupiter:
with these three scenes the principle is, as it were, sucked dry, and the other scenes
featuring the interaction of the gods are only preparation for their intervention in
individual cases.
There is restraint in the number of characters, or, when a great number is inevit-
able, as it is in the battles, a few are selected for ostentatious emphasis, and all the
rest are relegated to static or minor episodic roles; the intention is not only that the
few select characters shall stand out as being obviously more important, but that the
story-line of their actions should remain clean and uncluttered. People have often
mocked at the presentation of fortis Gyas fortisque Cloanthus (1.222 = 1.612)
[valiant Gyas and valiant Cloanthus] who do not manage to come to life. The
sharply drawn silhouettes of the participants in the Games, Sergestus and Cloanthus,
Entellus and Dares etc., show that Virgil was well able to create characters when he
chose to. Thus, when he makes no special mention of any of Aeneas' companions in
460 the first books, and gives very few details even about fidus Achates [trusty Achates],
there must have been a reason. For secondary figures to be characterized there has to
be a sub-plot, or at least a branching and broadening of the main plot; if, for
example, in the storm at sea, Virgil had wanted to show the characters of the
captains of the ships, or if, after the landing, he had wanted to show their different
reactions to misfortune, this would have obscured the clear storyline of Book 1, and
weighed down the simple exposition. Anyone who has understood this will find it
quite in order that, for example, the nurse Caieta is not mentioned until they come to
the place where she died and to which she gave her name (7.1ff.); this, and the fact
that she was nurse to Aeneas, is truly all that the reader needs to know about her. He
will understand when no attempt is made to bring Lavinia into the foreground,
turning her into an active figure; the happenings at the court of Latinus are compli-
cated enough as it is, and the poet happily makes use of the pretext that the early
Roman filia familias [daughter of the family] had no will of her own, and therefore
did not act independently, but allowed her parents to rule her. Lavinia is not sup-
posed to interest the reader as a person but only as the daughter of Latinus, whose
hand in marriage goes with the gift of the kingdom.
There is restraint in the use of detail; it is almost exclusively used where it can
deepen the emotional momentum of the action. If a tragic drama is to move us, it has
to be presented with all the fullness of life: in such cases Virgil does not refrain from
painting in every last detail. But whether the bow which fires a fateful shot is of one
style or another, whether the sceptre carried by a king previously belonged to one
person or someone else, whether the deer which Aeneas shoots for his hungry men
is carried to the shore in one way or another way, are all minor details with no
relevance to the plot, and therefore felt by Virgil to be an intrusion. If the Evander
scenes were an epyllion in the Hellenistic style, as it is sometimes suggested that
they are, how many small, neat touches would have been required to paint the
picture of the old man's simple household! Virgil has done it with a few bold
strokes, making it into a piece of epic action. Of course, the sparser the detail, the
461 more effective is what we have: when the king is wakened by the dawn chorus,
when two hounds run at his side, that would go almost unnoticed in the genre of the
epyllion: but here it adds a great deal to the atmosphere. And, as with these external
touches, so too with the depiction of thoughts and feelings. Of course Virgil was as
capable as anyone of painting a complicated state of mind in the greatest detail, on
the model of the great Alexandrian miniatures which depict emotions; the Eclogues
bear witness to this. In the epic he scorned to do so: whenever he has men and gods
speaking emotionally, it is always to reveal plain and straightforward feelings. I
have attempted above to show how, in the most complicated case, that of Dido, we
are not given a complicated picture, painted in all the colours of the rainbow and
lovingly shaded; we are presented with a well-arranged series of severe and serene
paintings, the epic-writer's fresco, which furthers the action. The Medea of Apollo-
nius, however inventive and charming the description of her maidenly timorousness
at the decisive step, and of her fear during the first rendezvous with Jason, lacks epic
grandeur by virtue of this multiplicity of tiny traits; when Dido is presented in a
similar situation, the poet refrains from decorative detail, and although he does not
manage to avoid falling into the conventional, he does preserve simplicity.
The temptation to depict psychological conflicts is resisted by Virgil, both in
Dido's case and elsewhere. One may be surprised at this; one might have thought
that the poet would have followed the example of drama and of Hellenistic nar-
rative; the contemporary elegy also undertook to express the battle between
conflicting emotions. Was Virgil not tempted to depict a battle between love and
duty in Aeneas' breast, giving a psychological motivation to the victory of duty? Or
to paint in detail the scruples of conscience displayed by King Latinus? Or to show
how Turnus' love and wounded honour overwhelm his sense of right and his good
sense in the heat of battle? Virgil makes us vaguely aware that such inner conflicts
are taking place; but he conceals them by using the symbol of a supernatural
intervention or, as in the case of Latinus, showing them to us only in an allusive
462 chiaroscuro. That Virgil was not naturally predisposed to such psychological prob-
lems is certain; but the same is surely true of the battle-scenes, and yet he did not
avoid these, because he felt that the plot demanded them; one will have to assume
that he regarded an intensive study of psychological conflicts as unsuitable for the
epic style.