The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton

5. Vergil the Evangelist: The Christiad of Alexander Ross

chapter five Vergil the Evangelist The Christiad of Alexander Ross =< tolle lege The Christiad that is the subject of this chapter represents nothing less than the ultimate Augustinian conversion of the epic form, and it is a truly stunning accomplishment. But even universal agreement on these points is unlikely to repair the legacy of its author, Alexander Ross (1590–1654). Born and educated in Scotland, Ross emigrated to England to serve as a schoolmaster in Southampton, was later ordained an Anglican chaplain, and is generally remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for having been the champion of losing positions in debates requiring intellectual and technical resources that he wholly lacked. For example, his book The New Planet no Planet, or, The Earth no wandring Star except in the wandring heads of Galileans (1646) makes no use of mathematics to attack the “erroneous , ridiculous, and impious” theory of a heliocentric universe. It therefore contributed not at all to the contemporary scienti‹c debate over the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems (or rather, by Ross’s time, not the Ptolemaic but Tycho Brahe’s compromise geocentric scheme then in favor at Rome). Similarly, the seventeenth-century philosophical controversy over Thomas Hobbes’s mechanist materialism was little affected by Ross’s barrage of scriptural citations and sarcasm in Leviathan Drawn Out with a Hook (1653), excepting this tract’s distinction as one of the earliest alarms to be sounded against Hobbes as a thinly disguised atheist.1 To be fair, Ross’s 135 achievements range farther than vehement polemic. They include the ‹rst English version of the Koran (1649, not from the Arabic but from Andre du Ryer’s 1647 French translation) and “the Second Part” of Ralegh’s Historie of the World (1652), in addition to the epic poem that is my subject. We also have, in John R. Glenn’s balanced account of Ross’s career, an assessment of the whole of Ross’s scholarly output that leaves a more favorable impression of his intelligence, learning, and talents than do most previous biographies and studies (see Ross 1987, 1–59). Even so, since the publication of Glenn’s critical edition of the Mystagogus Poeticus (1647)—a compendium of classical myths and their allegorical interpretation that is, today, Ross’s most frequently cited work in Milton studies—there has been little indication of any renewed scholarly interest in the writings of Alexander Ross for their own merits. To account for the modern neglect of his Christiad, we could simply observe that it is in Latin and has never been translated. But the real problem lies in its extremely unfashionable form: it is a Vergilian cento, which means, literally, a “patchwork” of Vergil’s poetry. Almost every line of this thirteen-book, 311-octavo-page epic is stitched together out of half-lines, lines, and brief passages from Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, arranged, grammatically adjusted, and with necessary substitutions of the names of people and places to produce a work (as the title page advertises) “in which all those things about our Lord Jesus Christ that are either stated or predicted in either Testament are sounded most sweetly by the divine, sublime trumpet of Maro.”2 As Ross boasts in his preface to the reader, “there is in this work no line (except a few) in which you will not discover a Vergilian song entire, or at least half, or his diction.”3 This is a truly stunning accomplishment, as I say, but is to most of us a very strange project indeed, one that could only be widely admired in an epoch whose sensibilities were quite alien to ours and, we might ungenerously observe, one that could only be undertaken by a man with far too much time on his hands. But the popularity of cento poetry actually has a very long history, waxing and waning from classical times to its modern revival in French alexandrines , and in the seventeenth century, Ross’s Christiad was a best seller.4 A ‹rst version, covering just the life of Christ in ‹fty-one octavo pages, was published in 1634 with the title Virgilius Evangelisans. It went through a second edition the same year, its success apparently spurring Ross to expand the work to full epic length (i.e., Vergil’s twelve books plus Vegio’s supplement equals thirteen), in which it was published just four years later as Virgilii evangelisantis Christiados libri XIII (1638). Besides another edition the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 136 < printed in London (1659), the poem also came out in Rotterdam, Zurich (both in 1653), and Debrecen (1684), re›ecting the period’s remarkable delight, or at least curiosity, in this particular form of Vergiliana.5 In 1660, Ross’s Christiad was even recommended for classroom use in Charles Hoole’s A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (187–88). In modern studies, one occasionally encounters a passing reference to Ross’s Christiad in discussions of the “minor epics” known to Milton.6 Here, I argue that Milton could have learned as much from the rhetorical strategy of Ross’s epic as from Vida’s Christiad.7 To some degree, we will ‹nd that what was observed of Vida’s allusive poetics is true of Vergilian cento as well; but before analyzing Ross’s epic, we should ‹rst look for some helpful guidance in the body of scholarship that has accumulated on the one cento poem that has attracted critical study. I refer to the mid-fourthcentury example of the genre attributed to Faltonia Betitia Proba, usually titled the Centones Virgiliani, which recounts in 693 lines the creation of the world and the life of Christ. It is noteworthy in part for being the earliest surviving instance of Christian Latin poetry and, as its modern translators note, “the earliest complete and extant work in Christian history that we are sure was written by a woman.”8 Most recorded opinions of the cento form—from St. Jerome’s in Proba’s day to D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s in ours—scorn it as mere ingenious hackwork, and Proba’s poem has been doubly denounced for its (implied) aberrant Christian doctrine.9 But Proba has had her cautious defenders, recently including R. P. H. Green. A bit sheepishly, Green concedes that “it may seem faintly absurd to claim or imply that a Vergilian cento has suffered unjusti‹ed neglect” (1995, 551), and he agrees with the general view that “centos are essentially a frivolous genre” (554). Nevertheless, he argues that Proba’s poem should be read more sympathetically, in light of her “serious educational purpose” (1997, 559). It seems that her poem was intended and actually served as a school text, teaching Vergil’s sublime style while avoiding the dangerous in›uence of his pagan gods and unwholesome subject matter.10 This emphasis on the educational utility of Proba’s poem, we recognize, echoes Botta’s reasons for recommending Vida’s Christiad over the teaching of classical authors, and we have Hoole to attest to the realization that Ross’s epic could be similarly employed. However, it should be noted that in Ross’s own preface to his cento, he does not betray any of Botta’s (or Proba’s presumed) fear of Vergil’s potentially corrupting in›uence.11 Ross asserts that the sublimity of Vergil’s phrases in fact re›ects the excellence of his character. “Nothing is more pure, more chaste, more ornate” than Vergil the Evangelist 137 = Vergil’s diction, he explains, “for Maro is not only the most learned of all poets but the most modest besides, indeed even virginal.”12 Ross then cites the “Messianic” Fourth Eclogue and Georgics 1 to attest to Vergil’s prophetic knowledge of Christ’s coming and to af‹rm the special ‹tness of the transformation of Vergil’s works (we might say, their apotheosis) into the Christiad. Not on account of the superstition of profane peoples ought we to shun their music, or not learn their literature because they say their author is Mercury: so says Augustine [De doctrina Christiana 2.18]. Let it be allowed to me, therefore, to clothe with Hebrew hides this sacred tabernacle of impure beings, and with the ‹rst Christians to honor Christ in the idolatrous temple and to consecrate the profane temple for them. Although I do not see why Vergil’s so chaste and useful poem ought to be called profane. Paul let slip nothing of his piety when he was carried in the idolatrous ship by Castor and Pollux , and neither is the name of Christ profaned if it is carried in the ship of a Vergilian: but whoever dares to say that Maro had no notion about Christ when about him he wrote so plainly in the Fourth Eclogue, and in a digression on the death of Caesar at the end of the First Georgic, no one is so blind but that he sees these things to be said about Christ, as Vives states [in his commentary on Augustine’s City of God 18.46].13 We see, then, that to Ross’s mind, a rearrangement of Vergil to have him sing explicitly of Christ is an improvement on Vergil in the original, but it is not, as Botta would have deemed it, an act of purifying a pimp who seduces with honeyed words, since Ross would count Vergil as, in some special way, among the blessed. Thus, in his recycling of the familiar “good physician” trope, there is no concern, for Ross, that the sweet liquid on the glass might counteract the bene‹ts of the bitter medicine. He writes, still in the preface: “Let it be allowed to me, the counterpart of a wise doctor, to render to those of squeamish stomach the salutary food of scripture made more agreeable with sweet condiment. For here, with pure Vergilian phrases, they may drink true piety and the Mysteries of our Religion from tender ages.”14 Even so, the basic selling point of Ross’s epic is identical to Vida’s as Botta touts it, and it is not any different from Proba’s cento as Green describes it. His Christiad offers itself to the schoolteacher who would have the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 138 < his charges acquire Vergilian Latin without departing from a biblical curriculum . In that respect, it was not exceptional for its day but on the same course as other contemporary projects—such as Julius Schiller’s (d. 1627), whose monumental star atlas, the Coelum stellatum Christianum (1627, 1660), replaces all the traditional names of the constellations with Christian ones. Prefaced with a dedication to Ferdinand II assuring him that there is “nothing scandalous” in this new map of the heavens, nothing “adverse to the Orthodox Catholic Religion or the laws of the Holy Roman Empire, or contrary to good morals,”15 the large-folio volume consists of ‹fty-one star maps with facing-page charts itemizing Schiller’s pious changes. The names of constellations in the northern hemisphere are inspired by the New Testament and early history of the Church: Aries is now St. Peter, for example; the Corona Borealis is Christ’s crown of thorns; Cassiopeia is Mary Magdeline ; Auriga is St. Jerome; Cygnus is St. Helena with Christ’s cross. The Old Testament supplies the names for the southern hemisphere: Apis is Eve; Centaurus is Abraham and Isaac; Eridanus represents Israel’s ›ight from Egypt. The planets of the solar system also have new names: Saturn is Adam; Jupiter is Moses. The sun is Jesus Christ; the earth’s moon, the Virgin Mary.16 If Schiller’s new star map had only caught on, the faithful would no longer be gazing at a night sky crowded with the relics of a pagan universe . Yet just as was true of my analysis of Vida’s Christiad, I am not so much interested in Ross’s epic as another example of a period effort to “Christianize the classics” or to supply schoolboys with a biblical alternative to Vergil’s narrative. I am concerned with the nature of the attraction of Ross’s cento for those who had already acquired their Vergilian Latin through the traditional route, which I assume describes everyone in the seventeenth century who actually purchased and read Ross’s poem. What I believe primarily worth recovering, in other words, is the interpretive process in which Ross involved his mature readers who knew their Vergil. For guidance on this point, by far the most helpful is a 1989 essay by Zoja Pavlovskis on Proba’s cento. Though largely devoted to an inquiry into the reasons that Jerome might have had for objecting so strongly to the “frivolous ” cento form, Pavlovskis’s primary aim is to articulate what she terms “the semiotics of the narrative Vergilian cento.” Two of her observations, though relatively minor and disconnected in the context of her own essay’s argument, deserve to be mentioned ‹rst for their special relevance to my study of Ross’s poem as an example of Augustinian epic. Pavlovskis points out, by way of defending Proba’s practice, Vergil the Evangelist 139 = that “cento-like literary composition” was long established by the fourth century (it “had been in existence at least since Aristophanes” [71]), and in a footnote, she also remarks that “the technique of composition in Augustine ’s Confessions in some ways resembles that of the cento” because of its seamless incorporation of scripture into its author’s personal narrative (71 n. 3). Shortly after, in discussing the contrasting styles of Homer and Vergil, Pavlovskis observes that the “ambiguity and allusiveness” of Vergil’s verse not only lent it to cento composition but made it “eminently appropriate” to such “non-literary, perhaps even perverse,” uses as “the well-known practice of sortes Vergilianae,” in which a passage from Vergil’s works was selected at random and interpreted as having personal signi‹cance to the life of the diviner-reader (75).17 Although in the Confessions, this is one of the superstitious practices that Augustine says he had rejected in his youth (4.3.5), nevertheless, in the pivotal episode of this work (as Pavlovskis also footnotes [1989, 75 n. 18]), Augustine describes his conversion under the ‹g tree as having followed his performance of the scriptural counterpart to the sortes Vergilianae, that is, sortes Biblicae, in imitation of what Augustine had recently heard of St. Anthony’s conversion.18 Upon hearing the voice of an unseen child singing the words, “Take it and read, take it and read” (tolle lege, tolle lege), Augustine picked up the volume of Paul’s epistles that he had just put aside, and, as he recounts, I opened it, and in silence I read the ‹rst passage on which my eyes fell: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in contention and rivalry, but arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the ›esh and its desires.”19 This is the most familiar literary example of sortes Biblicae in history, and as we see, it is based on an exhortation to abandon the ungodly life, including the culpa that Augustine tells us was his last by this point in his narrative: the life given over to lust (“in concupiscentiis”). After reading Paul’s words, Augustine wakens “suddenly” (statim) to his sin and abandons that one last provision he had still been making for his ›eshly appetite, so that he becomes then fully Christ’s. Moreover, this association between Augustine’s conversion and the practice of sortes Biblicae gives us another possible way to understand the Christian cento’s utility and appeal. Taking the bits and pieces of Vergil’s verse that, selected randomly, could be the basis of false prophecies, it instead arranges them ingeniously to tell the Gospel Truth, such that the profane material of sortes Vergilianae is now the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 140 < rendered sacred.20 Even, presumably, the phrases and lines describing Dido’s shameful burning, her fury and grief at Aeneas’s betrayal, and her rash and tragic suicide—now that they have been interwoven with other phrases and lines from Vergil to construct a narrative of the life of Christ— are part of a text that could safely and piously be used in turn for a cento counterpart to sortes Biblicae. If one hesitates, in other words, to embrace the view that Vergilian cento poetry “discovers” the Christian Truth embedded within the verses of Vergil, then the argument can be made that it reassembles these verses in order to make them available randomly for the Christian reader who would apply their now-Christian meaning to himself. Pavlovskis also observes of Proba what Philip Hardie does of Vida, that she “must have known all of Vergil by heart, and expected her readers too to be similarly grounded in his poems to appreciate what she was doing” (1989, 80).21 Consequently, Pavlovskis argues, the interaction between author and reader that occurs through the “metalanguage” of cento poetry is of a special nature: “the memory of the author and that of the reader are at work all the time. Both have to be constantly mindful of the original context and denotation and also the new use to which each line or portion of a line has been put, and all the subtleties involved at every step” (80).22 In this way, says Pavlovskis, Proba’s “adaptation gains from the reader’s recollection of the original setting of the borrowings” (74). Pavlovskis brie›y illustrates the point by way of reference to Proba’s narration of the slaughter of innocents, which draws lines from Vergil’s description of the sack of Troy in Aeneid 2. The Greeks’ slaying of the Trojans was “a heartless atrocity, from which Aeneas is divinely saved much as the infant Jesus is snatched from Herod’s maniacal rage,” explains Pavlovskis, who concludes, “The one event is made to pre‹gure the other” (74). In sum, the Christian cento by no means replaces Vergil, because it fundamentally requires “Vergilian memory” for its success. Remove the reader’s familiarity with Vergil’s poetry, and Proba’s poem paradoxically loses all its virtue, becoming an embarrassingly awkward retelling of the Biblical story, with obvious and abrupt gaps and falsi‹cation of much of its material. . . . But then a metalanguage is frequently notorious for its lack of direct meaning. Its impact is oblique, and just as a language is intelligible only to one who has learned it, a metalanguage becomes accessible only to those initiated, who will recognize implicit meanings that elude an outsider . (76) Vergil the Evangelist 141 = This description of the Vergilian cento’s “semiotics” recovers for us a crucial starting point for an analysis of Ross’s Christiad, although the limitations of space and her essay’s somewhat different focus mean that Pavlovskis’s interpretation of Proba’s verse in light of this semiotics is very brief and although the impact of her sophisticated general description is regrettably diluted by its single, one-dimensional illustration. By focusing exclusively on the effect of pre‹guration in explaining the relationships between the sack of Troy and the slaughter of the innocents and between Aeneas and the infant Jesus, she implies that performing such typological interpretations might be the only exercise of one’s “Vergilian memory” that is required by Proba’s cento. The experience of Proba’s readers would surely have been more complex, more as Pavlovskis imagines it in theory; indeed, it would have had much in common with what we have seen demanded by Vergilian allusions in Vida’s Christiad. Let us therefore examine a passage from Proba’s cento by way of demonstration, which can then lead us into our analysis of Alexander Ross’s epic. The passage is excerpted from Proba’s account of Adam and Eve’s fall and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, beginning with God’s ‹rst words to them after their disobedience. (Book and line references to Vergil’s Aeneid are provided to the side, indicating the source of each cento line.) “procul, o procul este profani” 6.258 conclamat, caelum ac terras qui numine ‹rmat. 6.259/4.269 atque illi longe gradientem ac dira frementem 10.572 ut videre, metu versi retroque ruentes 10.573 diffugiunt silvasque et sicubi concava furtim 5.677 saxa petunt. piget incepti lucisque, neque auras 5.678/6.733 dispiciunt: taedet caeli convexa tueri. 6.734/4.451 (lines 213–19)23 [“Away, away, you profane ones,” he who informs heaven and earth with his divinity proclaims. And when they see him approaching from afar and roaring curses, they turn in fear, ›eeing backwards, and they separate and furtively seek out woods and hollow rocks wherever these might be. They dread the coming light, nor welcome the gentle breeze; they are sick of gazing on the vault of heaven.] The experience of reading this poetry is a constant process of recognizing the Vergilian source and assessing the varying nature of the resonance that the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 142 < the original Vergilian context lends to the meaning of Vergil’s words in their new service to a biblical narrative. The ‹rst line of the passage and ‹rst word of the second line (lines 213–14) report the Sibyl’s warning as she turns to guide Aeneas into the underworld. It is Aeneas’s exceptional piety that quali‹es him for that journey and for the reunion with his father that awaits him in the Elysian Fields of the underworld; in contrast, the ‹rst parents’ act of impiety has disquali ‹ed them from dwelling any longer in Paradise, and their expulsion anticipates the “underworld” punishments of hell awaiting those who rebel against God their Father. The remaining words of Proba’s second line (line 214) are taken from Mercury’s explanation to Aeneas, in Aeneid 4, that he has been sent by the almighty Jove (“he who informs heaven and earth with divinity”) to command Aeneas to leave Carthage. We note the general similarity between the two moments—a heavenly message is delivered to “leave this place”—but we also perceive the more speci‹c parallels and contrasts between the two sets of circumstances and destinations: Aeneas, at work building Dido’s Carthage when the messenger god appears to him, is scolded for being “uxorius” (Aeneid 6.266) and delaying his fated journey; Adam, who has “listened to the voice of [his] wife” (audisti vocem uxoris tuae [Genesis 3:17]) and eaten the forbidden fruit, is, with Eve, cursed to embark on a journey, to leave the Garden of Eden and wander through the world. Lines 215–16 of Proba’s cento, which, for Proba, describe God’s wrath as he approaches Adam and Eve, were originally applied to Aeneas doing battle against the Latins, just after he had been characterized as “godlike” through comparison to the hundred-handed monster Aegaeon (aka Briarius ), who once engaged Jove in battle (Aeneid 10.565–70). Proba’s poem depends on us not only to transfer our recollected awe at Aeneas’s fury and might on the battle‹eld to this new context but, in so doing, to register the absolute disparity between that original “godlike” prompt to awe versus the wrath and power of the one true God. Line 217 and the ‹rst ‹ve words of line 218 originally described the Trojan women, in Aeneid 5, ›eeing the sight of their countrymen in dismay and shame after their realization that Juno had inspired them to set ‹re to their own ships—vaguely paralleling, we might observe, Satan’s deception of Eve before her and Adam’s futile ›ight from the judgment of God. The ‹nal two words of line 218 and the ‹rst word of line 219 emphasize the ‹rst parents’ act of disobedience as the original sin transmitted to all their offspring: they come from Aeneas’s meeting with his father in the underworld, just when Anchises is beginning to relate Vergil the Evangelist 143 = to Aeneas the process of each soul’s atonement for and purgation of its “stain of guilt” (infectum . . . scelus [Aeneid 6.735–43]). Finally, in the rest of line 219, we encounter the familiar description of Dido in her deep despair, when she sees no hope of future happiness or safety after Aeneas’s departure and decides to take her own life. That Adam and Eve are “sick of gazing on the vault of heaven” is a much graver indictment of their moral failing (as it was of Judas’s) than is the same phrase applied to Dido, for they have known the goodness of God and yet they run away from him, seeking to hide from his anger rather than abandoning themselves to his will and praying for his mercy. Thus the pity that we have felt for Dido is invoked, but it is then transferred to our ‹rst parents, commingled with a censure far severer than that which Augustine and the moral interpreters of the Aeneid level against Dido for the extremity of her passions. Obviously, different readers of Vergilian cento poetry, even among those who have “all of Vergil by heart,” would be able to draw upon their memories in different ways at different times, such that they would be sensitive to the moment-to-moment resonance of the original Vergilian contexts in varying degrees producing varying experiences, so my “readerresponse ” analysis of these lines from Proba’s cento is intended only to illustrate the nature of a process. What should be convincing, in any event, is that this process is not con‹ned to a hunt for typological meanings, in the form of ostensible Vergilian prophecies of Christ’s coming, but, rather, entails the constant apprehension of subtle narrative, ‹gurative, and ironic parallels and contrasts between each text, line after line and phrase after phrase. Such a reading experience perhaps could be compared to participating in a trivia game. Yet I suggest that the perceived value of this game in testing and strengthening its players’ faith might partially explain the popularity of cento poetry among Christians, from Proba’s in the fourth century to Alexander Ross’s in the seventeenth. arma virumque maro cecinit, nos acta deumque; cedant arma viri, dum loquor acta dei. As we might expect of a cento epic that stretches over three hundred pages, Ross’s Christiad is not always so “ingenious” in its composition as Proba’s poem, in that one periodically encounters lines in Ross’s poem that have no the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 144 < speci‹c source in Vergil’s works. Some, as Ross admits, contain only Vergil’s “diction”: words and phrases that can merely be found in Vergil and that allude to no single Vergilian passage. (There are also a number of lines, especially in the ‹nal book, that have no basis in Vergil whatsoever.) Yet frequently, as we shall see, there are certain Vergilian words that resonate powerfully and participate fully in the poem’s intertextual “metalanguage ,” to borrow Pavlovskis’s term, even when they appear to be detached from any particular, identi‹ably Vergilian context. In addition, Ross relies on multiline passages from Vergil’s works to a much greater extent than does Proba, which is another laborsaving device to be sure, but the effect is a sustained juxtaposition of the Vergilian and the biblical moment, allowing readers more time and more details for their discovery of relevant points of similarity and dissimilarity and for responding with appropriate moral judgments. Finally, we will also observe that the experience of reading Ross’s epic would likely have been further in›uenced by memory of Vida’s Christiad and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Ross seems to have been inspired by these works’ general themes and by their speci‹c Vergilian images and allusions for his selection and arrangement of lines from the Aeneid to recount certain events in Christ’s history, such that the poem’s intertextual “metalanguage” in these scenes proves all the more interestingly layered. This quality strikes us right at the beginning of the Christiad, where Ross supplies the conventional announcement of his theme. Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus avena 1.a24 Carmen, et Aegypto egressus per inhospita saxa 1.b/5.627 Perque domos Arabum vacuas et inania regna 6.269 Deduxi Abramidas; at nunc horrentia Christi 1.634 (5)25 Acta, Deumque cano, coeli qui primus ab oris 1.1 Virginis in laetae gremium descendit et orbem G2.326 Terrarum invisit profugus, Chananaeaque venit 4/1.2 Littora, multum Ille et terra jactatus et alto 1.3 Ni superum, saevi memorem Plutonis ob iram; 1.4 (10)Multa quoque in monte est passus dum conderet urbem. 1.5 Nam ligno incubuit, dixitque novissima verba, 4.650 Et sacram effudit multo cum sanguine vitam; 2 (7.534) Atque ausus penetrare sinus nigrantis Averni, 1.243 Sed tandem patrias atque altae victor remeavit ad oras? 1.7 Vergil the Evangelist 145 = (15) Evertitque deos Latii, et genus omne Latinum, 1.6 Albanosque patres atque altae moenia Romae. 1.7 (1–2) [I am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed, and sang of him who, leaving Egypt, led the children of Abraham across inhospitable rocks and through empty homes and vacant realms of Arabia; but now of the bristling acts of Christ, and of God I sing, he who ‹rst from the regions of heaven descended in the lap of the joyful Virgin and, a fugitive , visited this world, and came to Canaan shores, much tormented on earth and sea on account not from above, but of the unforgetting wrath of Pluto. And he suffered long upon the mountain until the time he would build a City. For he set himself on the cross, and said his last words, and poured out sacred life with much blood; and having dared to invade the hollow of black Avernus, did he not at last return victorious to his native regions? And he then overthrew the gods of the Latins, and the whole Latin race, and the Alban lords and walls of lofty Rome.] After introducing himself as having sung formerly of Old Testament history (Ross is referring to his ‹rst published works, the Rerum Iudaicarum Memorabiliorum [1617, 1619]), our poet offers a synopsis of his epic that is, as we would expect, mainly composed of lines from the Aeneid’s opening summary. But we also recognize that Ross’s synopsis invokes the allegorical interpretation of Aeneas’s wandering and warfare as the life journey of a good man’s soul, culminating in its victory over sin and ascent to heaven—and, I suggest as well, Tasso’s version of this allegory in his epic of the Christian army’s capture of Jerusalem. First, Aeneas’s exile in this passage is converted into Christ’s brief sojourn in this world. For in contrast to the journey of the unallegorized Aeneas from the ashes of one destroyed city on earth to the site of a future new city on earth, but like the soul of the allegorized Aeneas that returns to its divine source, the Son of God makes a round trip from and back to his “native regions” in heaven (coeli . . . ab oris [5] / patrias . . . ad oras [14]). Second, Christ as “victorious ” epic hero will, like Aeneas, “invade” and “overthrow” to ful‹ll his divine mission to “build a City.” This “City” is capitalized in my translation because it clearly refers to the City of God, whose founding entails not defeat of the Latins or toppling the “walls of lofty Rome” but, rather, the Roman Empire’s conversion following the promise of salvation through Christ (though we might also perceive, given Ross’s staunch Protestantism, the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 146 < that in these lines he means to prophesy a ‹nal overthrow of the Roman Catholic Church). Like Tasso’s Jerusalem, then, Rome, in this formula, is not destroyed by Christian assault but liberated from darkness, to be newly founded as the earthly city that is a ‹gure for the heavenly city. That statement of the Christiad’s theme thus brings Ross’s biblical epic into loose association with the allegorical tradition, but again, it is the way in which this association contributes to the experience of the reader’s lineby -line encounter with Vergil’s language that makes such an observation meaningful. A passage from the narrative of Christ’s Passion, in book 11, illustrates the point. Nox erat et placidum carpebant fessa soporem 4.522 Corpora per terras, sylvaque et saeva quierunt 4.523 Aequora, cum medio volvantur sidera lapsu, 4.524 Cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes, pulchraeque volucres: 4.525 (5) Quaeque lacus late liquidos, quaeque aspera dumis 4.526 Rura tenent, somno positae sub nocte silenti 4.527 Lenibant curas, et corda oblita laborum. 4.528 At non iam Christus (qui tristi in mente volutat 6.185 Tot curas, cuius divina est ira) medullas 3/4.66 (10)Solvitur in somnos, oculisve aut corde quietem 4.530 Accipit, ingeminant gemitus, semperque recursat 2/4.531 Laethi horror, magnoque dolorum ›uctuat aestu. 4.532 (238) [It was night, and over the earth weary creatures were tasting peaceful slumber, and the woods and wild seas were reposed in sleep, when stars are rolled midway in their gliding, when all the land is still, and beasts and beautiful birds—those that everywhere are in limpid lakes, and those that dwell in ‹elds of tangled brakes—are couched in sleep beneath the silent night. Cares are eased, and the heart forgetful of labor. But Christ (who ponders in his sad mind so many cares, he whose wrath is divine) is not now deep dissolved in sleep, or admits rest into his eyes or heart; his sighs redouble, the dread of oblivion returns again and again, and he is borne by a great tide of sorrow.] In chapter 3, I noted Tasso’s direct translation of the opening lines of this passage (1–7) in Gerusalemme liberata 2.96. The lines in the Aeneid paint a scene of peace and calm to be contrasted with Dido’s restless torment, but Vergil the Evangelist 147 = in Tasso’s epic, they precede a description of the Christian warriors’ restless desire to reach the city of Jerusalem. By associating their cupidigia with Dido’s culpable desire, so I argued, the allusion works to suggest the soldiers ’ moral vulnerability as spiritual pilgrims even as Tasso describes their praiseworthy zeal to liberate Christ’s sepulchre. Recall also that in the cantos of Gerusalemme liberata, vulnerability is made manifest: the warriors succumb to the ignoble passions of lust and wrath, dividing Goffredo’s army against itself and from its purpose. Here in Ross’s epic, Vergil’s lines appear again in a conspicuous block, and here, too, they set up a contrast between a scene of surrounding calm and the burning of human emotion. But this time the words describing Dido’s passion are used to describe Christ’s—and we are required to mark the absolute distinction between them. Unlike our interpretation of Tasso’s warriors, we must not allow Dido’s culpa, through association, to diminish at all our con‹dence in Christ’s blameless character. Instead, Ross would have us recall the properly devout interpretation of Christ “in agonia” (as he is described in Luke 22:43 of the Vulgate). According to the Geneva commentary (to Luke 22:44), Christ’s “great distresse” on this night reaf‹rms that he “was true man.”26 In the reference to his divine wrath (cuius divina est ira [9]), furthermore, Ross includes a reminder that (quoting the Geneva commentary again) “Christ strove not onely with the feares of death, as other men use to doe . . . but with the fearefull judgement of his angry Father: and the matter was for that he tooke the burden of all our sinnes upon himselfe.” Thus, a good part of what is involved in the reading of this passage is a recognition of how it distinguishes, rede‹nes, and redistributes the passions that it portrayed before in Vergil and Tasso. In contrast to Dido’s shameful desire for Aeneas, her violent anger at his departure , and her suicidal despair—and in contrast, also, to Tancredi’s eagerness to die by the sword of his beloved Clorinda and to the fury of Rinaldo followed by his dissipation in the arms of Armida—there is the “agonie” and “distresse” that Christ feels at his pending torture and execution and in his desire to do God’s will. And it is God’s will that Christ sacri‹ce his life for the redemption of the human race, to die for love in the sense that most merits our and Augustine’s tears, because these are tears of gratitude and joy as well as of pity. For an example of a passage in Ross’s Christiad that is complicated by its echo of Vida and the allegorical commentaries, besides its composition out of Vergil, we may turn to the description of the three kings, in book 8, as they are guided by the star to Bethlehem and come upon the infant Jesus in Mary’s arms. the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 148 < Postquam digressi coelo constare sereno 3.518 Cuncta vident, iterum multa cum luce cucurrit 3.518/2.694 Stella ardens donec tandem super astitit aede 2.694/(6.17) Virginis, et late lustravit lampade tecta 4.6 (5) Tunc Reges praeter solitum dulcedine laeti G1.412 Interiora domus irrumpunt limina, et almum 4.645 Infantem aspiciunt, quem mater Diva lacertis 8.387 Ridentem amplexu molli foret; illic vicissim 8.387 Dat matri amplexus, atque oscula dulcia ‹git. 1.687 (10)Ut tres conspexit venientes virgo tyrannos 3.306 Obstupuit primo aspectu tunc plurimus ignem 1.613/12.65 Subiecit rubor, et calefacta per ora cucurrit: 12.66 Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro 12.67 Si quis ebur, vel mista rubent ubi lilia multa 12.68 (15) Alba rosa, tales virgo dabat ore colores. 12.69 Mirantur puerum, ‹guntque in virgine vultus 12.70 Suppliciter Reges, et sanctum Numen adorant. 2.700 In puero observant divini signa decoris, G4/5.647 Ardentesque notant oculos qui spiritus illi, 5.648 (20)Qui vultus, vocisque sonus; iurat usque videre 5.649 Virgineum vultum, ut rosea cervice refulget, 3.216/1.402 Utque ›uunt nitidi per lactea colla capilli. 4/8.660 (166–67) [Afterwards, having left, they see the star in the calm sky, and brightly the burning star hastened until at last it stood above the house of the Virgin, and far and wide lit the roof with its lamp. Then the kings, with joyous sweetness more than customary, burst into the inner chamber of the house, and they behold the propitious infant, whom the divine mother, smiling, embraces softly in her arms; in turn he gives an embrace to his mother’s side, and she imprints sweet kisses. When the Virgin saw the three kings coming in, she was ‹rst astonished by the sight and then a deep blush was set a‹re, and it coursed across her burning face: just as if someone had stained Indian ivory with bloody dye, or as when white lilies are tinted red by intermingled roses, so the Virgin displayed in the color of her face. Suppliant, the kings marvel at the boy, and they fasten their looks on the Virgin, and they adore holy God. In the boy they observe signs of divine grace, and they note the burning eyes, what spirit, what visage, and the sound of his voice, and all the while he conspires to gaze on the face of the Virgin, as her roseate neck gleamed, and as her shining hair ›owed over her milky neck.] Vergil the Evangelist 149 = Like Vida, Ross borrows Aeneid 12’s enigmatic report of “Lavinia’s blush” for part of his description of the Virgin Mother. In Vida’s poem, we recall, the occasion of “Mary’s blush” was the prophets’ prayers for a sign that would identify her chosen husband. On either side of the allusion to Lavinia in Ross’s poem, however, the portrait of Mary and the Christ child is composed of readily recognized phrases that were originally applied by Vergil to Venus and Dido. The combination is somewhat startling, even when we account for the restrictions Ross was under in relating the particular details of any given biblical episode (there is, after all, only one scene in the Aeneid in which a woman exchanges caresses with an infant). The challenge of this combination for Ross’s readers is in rightly parsing its moral associations. As we saw in Vida’s Christiad, Mary’s blush in lines 11–16 of Ross’s poem can only have the most positive signi‹cance that critics have ascribed to Lavinia’s original—as a sign, that is, of the maiden’s innocence and modesty . We could also, just as appropriately, surmise in the manner of Botta, by interpreting the lilies and roses to symbolize respectively Mary’s “purity” and “love of her chastity” (Vida 1569, 93r; see discussion in chap.4 of the present study). But this passage in the Christiad also demands of its readers some rather abrupt interpretive adjustments going into and following just after this moment of her blush. Line 9’s description of the infant Christ returning his mother’s embrace while she “imprints sweet kisses” is at once recognized as having come from Venus’s speech to Cupid in the Aeneid, when she is instructing him to approach Dido in the guise of Aeneas’s young son, to play in her lap and receive her kisses, so that he can “inspire a hidden ‹re and beguile her with [his] poison” (occultum inspires ignem fallasque veneno [1.688]). Amor goes as his mother bids, and Dido— “knowing not how great a god settles there to her sorrow”—takes him to her and “fondles him in her bosom” (interdum gremio fovet, inscia Dido, / insidat quantus miserae deus [1.718–19]). We register the lowest common denominators of these two scenes from the Aeneid and Christiad—a child in a woman’s lap and a god of love made ›esh—but obviously we are expected to reject immediately all the negative attributes of Vergil’s con‹guration of this scene (especially as the moral commentaries de‹ned them), even as we read his words in Ross’s epic. Venus sent her son to poison the queen of Carthage with a shameful, earthly love, which ultimately brought her sorrow and untimely death, but God, in his in‹nite love and goodness, sent his son as a blessing not only to Mary but to all humankind, for though, by her son’s sacri‹ce, she will know deep sorrow, yet she is the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 150 < ennobled (she is the mater Diva who shall become the Queen of Heaven), and by this son’s death, he will conquer all death, not bring more of it. Having thus distinguished Mary from Dido, unhappy victim of Venus, we next contemplate the Virgin Mother in her kinship with Lavinia as symbol of purity and chastity (as already discussed). Then, in line 21, Ross invites us to compare and distinguish between Mary and Venus herself, upon encountering the detail that Mary’s “roseate neck gleamed” (rosea cervice refulget). It was the sign of this gleaming that ‹rst revealed Venus’s identity to Aeneas outside Carthage, eliciting from him the complaint: “Why, so cruel, do you mock your son so often with false images? Why may not I join my hand to yours and hear and speak true words?” (Aeneid 1.407–9). Hence, our ‹rst obligation is to mark the contrast between Aeneas’s frustrated desire for his mother’s honest companionship, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, this image of the baby Jesus freely enjoying the embraces of his mother and the beauty of her face. But this does not quite dispel the potentially unsettling associations attached to the line, particularly given its coordination with the two other remarks on Mary’s beauty that follow: Mary had “shining hair” that “›owed over her milky neck” (›uunt nitidi per lactea colla capilli). These observations are not so much the narrator’s as those of the three kings in the room, men whose hearts could be moved in the wrong way by these sights of feminine beauty—and would be if moved by the passions of the earthly Venus. Our responsibility, when reading these details, is always to understand that when the pious “fasten their looks on the Virgin,” as the kings do in this passage, they are moved by her beauty to “adore holy God” (‹guntque in virgine vultus . . . sanctum Numen adorant [Christiad 16–17]). They are inspired, as it were, by the celestial Venus. In such moments as this, I would submit, Ross’s cento invites its readers to measure themselves by their own pious or imperfect response to Mary’s beauty, to ask whether they are moved like the three kings to the love of God or instead catch themselves in ‹xed admiration of her lovely hair and skin. A similar challenge to revise one’s response to a Vergilian description of physical beauty occurs in what would seem, at ‹rst, the unlikely moment of book 12’s narrative of the cruci‹xion, where Mary and the apostles are grieving at the foot of the cross. On seeing Mary’s suffering, Simon Peter goes to give her comfort. Hanc ubi conspexit curis ingentibus aegram, 3.306/1.208 Demisit lachrymas, dulcique affatur amore est. 6.455 Vergil the Evangelist 151 = Ecce tuum natum mulier, tum forte Johannem 1/3 Conspexit, simul his ardentem affatur amicum: 9.198 (5) Ecce tuam matrem. Perculsa mente dederunt 1/9.292 Adstantes lachrymas; ante omnes ipse Johannes; 9.293 Atque animum patriae strinxit pietatis imago. 9.294 Tum coepit solari inopem, et succurrere solae, 9.290 Et colere ut propriam genetricem; sic pius heros 4/4 (10)Lugentem matrem nolebat linquere solam, 6/9.482 Sed consanguineo lachrymans commendat amico: 5.771 Foelix sorte tua, foelix hac matre Johannes, 12.932/4 Et foelix tectum cui talis contigit hospes, 2/8 Nempe dei genetrix, forma pulcherrima virgo.27 2.788/1.496 (257) [When he observed her suffering with weighty sorrows, he shed tears and spoke to her with sweet love: “Oh woman, behold your son”—and then by chance he saw John, and at once he addresses his impassioned brother, “Behold your mother.” Standing near with stricken minds they shed tears, John himself before all others; and the image of fatherly devotion moved his soul. Then he began to comfort the helpless woman, and to give aid to her, so forsaken, and to care for her as his own mother. Thus the pious hero was unwilling to leave this mourning mother alone, but weeping commends her to his loving brother: “Happy in your fate, happy in this mother, John, and happy the abode such a guest has touched, truly the mother of God, a virgin most beautiful in form.”] When, in Aeneid 1, Vergil introduces “forma pulcherrima Dido” (496) in progress with her train of youths, it is shortly after Aeneas has heard her story from his mother, Venus, and just as he is marveling at the grandness of Dido’s city and the tragedy of Troy’s destruction depicted on the walls of Juno’s temple, so that when Dido appears to him, he is already “stunned and standing in one ‹xed gaze” (stupet obtutuque haeret de‹xus in uno [495]). He is all too ready, in other words, to be seduced from his divinely appointed destination by the crowning vision of Dido’s splendor and beauty. For readers of Ross’s epic, in contrast, it is hard to imagine a less appropriate moment to pause and admire the Virgin Mother as a seductive “forma pulcherrima virgo” (particularly given the way this phrase emphasizes the quality of shapeliness). We would have to count this as one of the more “embarrassingly awkward” Vergilianisms in cento poetry (as the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 152 < Pavlovskis, cited earlier in this chapter, admits is ever risked by the form), except that having read Vida’s Christiad, we understand readily what response Ross aims to elicit by it. The word foelix—meaning both “happy” and “fruitful”—is repeated three times in lines 12 and 13 of this passage, recalling to memory Dido’s epithet infelix just before the words referring to her (now Mary’s) beauty appear in line 14. Here, at this time of tremendous grief for Mary and Christ’s disciples, Dido’s epithet could, in the precise sense of “unhappy,” be decorously applied to her and them. Instead, Ross applies the opposite word, foelix, to those who will offer Mary shelter, who adopt her as their own mother, signifying, of course, all those who will acknowledge her son as Son of God and their Savior and who are thus “happy in [their] fate.” This shift of focus, from the mother’s grief for her martyred son to the happy fruit of his martyrdom, patterns the interpretive move required of readers when Mary is described as “forma pulcherrima.” She is genuinely beautiful, to be sure, just as she is genuinely suffering: but it is understood that her maternal unhappiness at this moment signi‹es the world’s happiness hereafter and that her being “most beautiful” points to her being most blessed, just as Botta understood Vida to mean when he translated Vida’s prior use of the phrase “pulcherrima virgo” as “beatissima virgo” (Vida 1569, 93r; see chap. 4). In a sense, Dido thus haunts Ross’s epic, and Vergil’s lines depicting her torment by love occur regularly in places we would probably not expect. In book 11, for example, Ross employs the familiar passage that opens Aeneid 4 to describe the anxiety that Peter feels after Jesus has been taken prisoner. At mens Bar-Jonae iamdudum saucia cura 4.1 Vulnus alit venis, et caeco carpitur igne: 4.2 Multa viri Virtus animo, multusque recurrit 4.3 Oris honos, haerent in‹xi pectore vultus, 4.4 Verbaque nec placidam membris dat cura quietem. 4.5 (242–43) [But the mind of Peter, long stricken with grief, feeds the wound with his blood and is consumed by hidden ‹re: over and over the virtue of the man, the grace of his features, return to his heart, his image and words remain ‹xed in his breast, and sorrow admits no quiet rest to his limbs.] However much we may have been conditioned to reject our tears for Dido, the burden is on us not to permit our recognition of these lines’ original Vergil the Evangelist 153 = reference to taint or trivialize Peter’s anguish. Instead, this passage invites us to remember and to revive our feelings of pity for the Aeneid’s tormented lover just long enough to transfer them to this different kind of “lover” in Ross’s Christiad, whose torment, by comparison to Dido’s, is now to be remembered as more worthy of our tears. In a variation on the tradition of negative allegorical interpretations of the queen of Carthage, Ross involves us in a process of repeatedly remembering Dido for the twofold purpose of condemning her as exemplum of ignoble love even while exploiting her emotive power in the praise of Christian virtue. How Dido works in the Christiad is representative of how this patchwork poem works generally. Calling Peter “the pious hero” invites our admiration of his devout and ‹lial character, as it does of Aeneas’s, but it also demands that we mark the distinction between Peter’s faith in the one true God and Aeneas’s (and Vergil’s) reverence of “the false and lying gods.” We are similarly tasked by the title page couplet that advertises the Christiad’s rejection of Vergil’s martial theme—“Arms and the man Maro sang, we, acts and God; away with the arms of Man, while I speak the acts of God” (Arma virumque Maro cecinit, nos acta Deumque; / Cedant arma Viri, dum loquor acta Dei)—even though Ross concludes his epic with an urgent call to arms. As book 13’s “argument” paraphrases (after narrating the Son’s last appearances and instructions to the apostles and his apotheosis to heaven), “Christians are exhorted to mutual peace again, and to wage war against the Turks” (Christiani ad pacem mutuam rursus exhortantur , et ad bellum Turcis inferendum [288]). That this “exhortation” partly is conveyed through a notorious speech of Dido’s from Aeneid 4 complicates its message interestingly and makes a ‹tting close to our analysis of Ross’s epic. In urging a united Christendom to make war on the in‹del, Ross writes, Exoriare aliquis nostratum ex ossibus ultor 4.625 Qui face barbaricos, ferroque sequare tyrannos 4.626 Nunc, olim, quocunque dabunt se tempore vires: 4.627 Littora litoribus contraria, ›uctibus undas 4.628 Imprecor arma armis pugnent, ipsique nepotes. 4.629 (309) [Arise from the ashes, some avenger of ours, who will pursue these barbarian tyrants with ‹re and sword—now, someday, whenever strength may be given its time: let shore with opposite shore, I pray, let waves with waves, and arms against arms do battle, against them and all their children.] the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 154 < This passage, we recognize, is from Dido’s curse against the departing Trojans, speci‹cally her prayer for some future Carthaginian-born “avenger,” understood to have been answered in the person of Hannibal, who brought “‹re and sword” almost to Rome’s gates. By converting this prayer to a call for holy war, Ross in one sense “puri‹es” its savagery, by inscribing it within the same ethos that justi‹es Tasso’s celebration of war in Gerusalemme liberata: the modern epic poet may sing of arms as long as they are a Christian’s used to liberate Christ’s sepulchre or to preserve Christendom. But also like Tasso, Ross may mean more than he says in imagining glorious victory over the Turk. He may instead mean just what he had stated in his title-page announcement, “away with the arms of Man, while I speak the acts of God,” for the image of war against the Turk often served allegorically to represent the soul’s battle against the temptations of the ›esh or its defense against temporal or spiritual oppressors.28 We are returned by this point, ‹nally, to Petrarch’s allegorization of Hannibal’s war against Rome and to Hannibal’s defeat by Scipio in the Africa, in which Dido’s prophetic curse is answered by the soul’s victory over the culpa her city symbolizes. But in Dido’s and now Ross’s prayer, victory is not imagined to be ‹nal. The soul’s battles against “barbarian tyrants” is being waged and will be waged in “all [our] children.” One aspect of that battle is the Christian’s duty to interpret devoutly, to distinguish between profane and pious, culpable and innocent, falsity and truth. That, I submit, is the conception behind Ross’s cento Christiad—not to teach “all [our] children” Vergilian Latin without ever exposing them to Vergil’s epic, but to enlist readers’ knowledge of Vergil’s epic in the ongoing defense of their faith. Vergil the Evangelist 155 = ...