The Harvard School, Virgil, and Political History: Pure Innocence or Pure in No Sense?

The most trustworthy tributes often come inverted, from opponents, free of suspicion of flattery. I confess that the work of the Harvard School has revitalized study of Virgil, and in my own case has helped evoke, provoke, years of work on what I consider to be increasingly misunderstood poetry. It is comforting to observe that far better qualified critics than I consider the most familiar arguments of the Harvard School to be, as Bertrand Russell wrote of Plato, "still worth refuting."

A miner with myopia, who has identified a rich seam but is—unless his vision be corrected—unable to exploit it scientifically, may do important damage. The HS, in my opinion, implies an attitude to political history, and biography, which is unexamined, wishful, and self-indulgent—yet may leave in its wake scholarly progress of the first importance.

The Harvard School depends importantly on linguistic evasion or "persuasive definition." Its own name, proudly assumed at times, gives away nothing about attitude to Virgil, while its members have divided critics misleadingly into "pessimists" and "optimists." One inadequately defined term indeed has become a password: "disturbing." Miners in the Harvard seam announce their finds with this word above all. Richard Thomas, in his long march through parts of Virgil's text and its reception, has succeeded—to the genuine benefit of the subject—in finding much which qualifies as "disturbing." But precisely who is disturbed to find apparent reservations in the poet's attitude towards Augustus and his regime? Only the modern reader? Surely the implication is less modest in its scope: interpreters from the Harvard School may rather hope to tell us about the poet's resistance to pro-Augustan ideas of his own day. Some of Virgil's contemporaries were, it seems, meant by the poet to be disturbed by such things as Augustus' ancestor shown closing the Aeneid with the passionate execution of an enemy. Now, if scholars of the Harvard School claim to tell us anything about Virgil's intentions towards his contemporary audience, they are committed to doing political history, to a study of what that audience knew about Octavian–Augustus, and thought possible for the future. Yet this is a study they seldom attempt.

An audience that has lived through decades of civil war does itself tend to be disturbed, both by what it has lived through and also by (to reapply a phrase of Tacitus, Ann. 14.31) metu graviorum, the fear of worse in future. That precarious future, for Virgil's contemporary audience, extended far beyond Actium; no contemporary could reasonably expect that a ruler with a record of serious ill health, heir to a tradition of short-lived rule by warlords (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Antony), would survive in power for some forty-five years after Antony's defeat. Contemporaries of Virgil knew of Octavian as the most implacable killer among the triumvirs, who even in stopping his proscriptions had insisted on the right to restart them (Suet. Aug. 27.1f.). Contemporaries of Virgil also knew that the civil wars of the 40s and 30s had been far deeper and longer than a modern reader might suspect from Virgil's text. Literary scholars, guided by that text, have reached a circular interpretation of history: that since Virgil never explicitly refers to the Republicans who fought on for six years after Philippi (42–36 bce), repeatedly defeating Octavian at sea and coming within an ace of capturing him (at Tauromenium in 36), such things were not important for Virgil's poetry. The civil wars are sometimes presented as virtually ending in 42 only to reopen in 31. But I have uttered a book on this subject (2008).

In short, the Harvard School does not attend critically to Roman history. If it did, it would realize that what we may feel to be disturbing elements in Aeneas' character, perhaps introduced by Virgil to create by implication a pointedly maculate image of his descendant Augustus, in reality offered to contemporaries something that might, in its historical context, be positively soothing. In contrast with...