Classical Epic Tradition

IV. Virgil

IV VIRGIL T HE Alexandrian tradition passed to Rome, to a quite different civilization, more primitive and barbarous in many ways, more vigorous, more comic, more aware of manifest destiny. It was from this shadowed, refracted, often paradoxically elusive and imprecise culture that Europe, and more than Europe, would take a stamp which has proved indelible. The literary voice of Rome has been Virgil. In this sense he is the founder-poet of Western civilization. He has suffered the fate of all who succeed, even in offering only an unrealizable ideal: to be taken for granted. Raised in the Middle Ages to the status of magician, depressed by the Romantics to the level of pallid imitator, praised and abused for the wrong reasons, pointedly ignored, Virgil has for twenty centuries simply been there and available, the Sphinx of epic in a too often waterless desert. I But even the desert has a historyl Virgil was in the first place a product of his own time. He was an Italian and a Roman, born in an age when all things Roman seemed on the verge of destruction by the greed and ambition of Romans themselves. Blinded by the ideals set before us by poets and writers anxious to disguise abuses, the student sometimes forgets the sordid financial facts that lay behind the Roman domination of the world. The vindictive outburst ofa Christian visionary is a valuable corrective (Revelation 18:11-17, New English Bible): The merchants of the earth also will weep and mourn for her, because no one any longer buys their cargoes, cargoes of gold and silver, jewels and pearls, clothes of purple and scarlet, silks and fine linens; all kinds of scented woods, ivories, and every sort of thing made of I Cf. D. Comparetti, Virgilio nel medio evo (repr. Florence 1937); K. Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie vom Ausgang des klassischen Altertums bis auf Goethe und Wilhelm von Humboldt, Bd. 1-2 (Berlin 1914-1921); G. Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Altertums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus (Berlin 1893); B. Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago 1961); Ralph C. Williams, The Theory of the Heroic Epic in Italian Criticism of the 16 C. (diss. Johns Hopkins 1917); G. B. Townend, "Changing Views of Virgil's Greatness," Classical Journal LVI (1960-61), 67-77. 104 Virgil 105 costly woods, bronze, iron, or marble; cinnamon and spice, incense, perfumes and frankincense; wine, oil, flour and wheat, sheep and cattle, horses, chariots, slaves, and the lives of men. 'The fruit you longed for,' they will say, 'is gone from you; all the glitter and the glamour are lost, never to be yours again!' The traders in all these wares, who gained their wealth from her, will stand at a distance from horror at her torment, weeping and mourning and saying, 'Alas, alas for the great city, that was clothed in fine linen and purple and scarlet, bedizened with gold and jewels and pearls! Alas that in one hour so much wealth should be laid waste!' The modern historian hastens to confirm the apocalyptic dream.2 The conquest of the Mediterranean, essentially completed with the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C., had brought untold wealth to fill the coffers of Rome, large amounts of which, both in coin and artistic treasures, had been diverted to build or adorn the mansions of the powerful. Laboring under impositions and exactions of the most outrageous kind, the once-proud cities of the eastern Mediterranean were sunk in ruin and degradation. Even the agriculture of that region had decayed to such an extent that nations which once supplied oil and wine to the rest of mankind were now forced to import those commodities from Italy. Within Italy itself, heartless confiscations from the free but poor farmers, ruthless exploitation of the slave gangs, lavish political bribery, cynicism, manipulation of religious beliefs for ulterior motives , bloody proscription and massacre, profiteering, disregard for the law, had become the norm. From such wrongs not only Virgil's own family and township, but Horace and Propertius too, had suffered. Materialism wrought spiritual chaos. The ancient religion of Roman peasants, never meant to provide a rationale of empire, had shown its inadequacy as early as the days of the Second Punic War. Its gaps were filled by the wildest superstitions imported from the very East where Roman depredation had induced desolation and despair. Among the more educated, we find the astonishing paradox that...