Technique and Ideas in the Aeneid by Gordon Williams (review)

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 189 GORDON WILLIAMS. Technique and Ideas in the Aeneid. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983. The general thesis of this book is that we can enhance our understanding of the Aeneid by realizing that the poem associates several dimensions of experience into a single narrative; one result of this is that some passages must be taken more literally than others; the clues ("indexes") of the degrees of literalness are often hidden or disguised; there are also hidden shifts of point of view. This general argument is in the end convincingly made. In one of the best passages Williams distinguishes between objective and subjective similes. When Aeneas, chasing Turnus, is compared to a "lively Umbrian hound" chasing a deer, that is only how he seems to the petrified Turnus. In fact he is lame at this stage and rather unlike a lively hound. That is a subjective simile. When the enamoured Dido is compared to a deer trailing from its side a deadly arrow unwittingly shot by a huntsman, the simile indicates the objective facts of Dido's condition, when neither he nor she knows them. The simile is objective. That is good, sensitive analysis, and there is no lack of it in the book. Another example is what Williams says about the degrees of approximation to propaganda. There is some propaganda value, certainly, in the "Twin Gates of War" (7.607), for Augustus made a great fuss about closing the gates of Janus on three occasions; but "a far more Augustan attitude is shown in sentiments such as those of Horace in Odes 3.2 lauding war against foreigners as the gymnasium of patrioti~ not something that we associate with Virgil (p.238). Exactly right. Williams insists on studying technique first, ideas later, on the principle that otherwise a whole philosophy or theology or cosmology might begin to form in a reader's mind, based on passages some of which might only have some technical or figurative function. This pays off in his study of Book 6. He shows convincingly that each passage of the underworld narrative subverts in some respect the one before; so that questions such as "did Aeneas really go to the underworld, or did he just dream it?" finally begin to look fairly silly. The book is not, however, consistent in its technical approach, and this will be the first major criticism. In the introduction there is an admirably clear distinction (2): This is not, it must be insisted, to propose a reductive thesis that Fate and the gods are mere figural concepts in the Aeneid. It is, on the contrary, to declare a method: to ask questions about technique before trying to discover what ideas are being expressed. This does not in the least exclude the possibility of understanding statements about Fate and the gods also as theological beliefs expressed by the poet. A fter being reassured in that way the reader can reasonably express astonishment to find these words, three pages later: 190 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS ... every event is made to have its own special place in a great predestined chain that leads unswervingly to the age of Augustus. But this is a poetic strategem; the poet is not confessing to a belief in determinism, he is creating a sense of dramatic and significant connectedness, in such a way that a large-scale pattern in history is revealed .... This is a poetic figure, not a religious idea. This is giving with one hand and taking away with another, and appears to involve a complete contradiction. There are other flaws of argumentation. Virgil in his epitaph for Nisus and Euryalus says that their names will live forever si quid mea carmina ~ossunt. Williams considers that this shows genuine doubt on Vlrgi IS part about the immortality of his own poetry (207): Here it could just signify modesty on the part of the poet, but there is no way of escaping the possiblility that the poet is expressing a heartfelt doubt. It is, in fact, characteristic of his style that he uses this structure in such a way that the suggestion of doubt is unmistakable as at least part of the...