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  • The Harvard School and the Problem of History
  • Craig Kallendorf

To start, my title requires a word of explanation. One of the better arguments in favor of the validity of the Harvard School approach is the vigor with which its tenets have been attacked over the last couple of generations. I will leave most aspects of this dispute to others, but I want to confront head-on one of the strongest arguments against the Harvard School perspective: If some sort of deep-seated pessimism is a driving force in Vergilian poetry, why did it take nearly two millennia for critics to identify it and insist on its importance? In other words, is the lack of [End Page 84] a tradition of pessimistic interpretation not proof that these critics are simply reading their own modern cynicism back into Vergil's poetry?

This is a legitimate question that deserves a carefully researched and well-thought-out answer. Most of us would agree that it is at least possible that it might take centuries before someone is able to respond to an aspect of a work of literature that is in fact there: a good example is the Vergilian foundation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, which was not recognized until around the same time as the Harvard School began to coalesce, but which is now generally accepted as an important aspect of the play (Hamilton 1990; James 1997; Tudeau-Clayton 1998). But if the pessimistic approach to the Aeneid in fact sprang fully formed from the head of some hermeneutic Zeus at the end of the twentieth century, then at the very least some significant skepticism would be justified.

To be sure, some cracks in the optimistic edifice clearly precede the rise of the Harvard School. Nicholas Horsfall, who is certainly no pessimist, has noted that key elements of its approach can be found in essays from the twenties, thirties, and forties by E. Adelaide Hahn, C. M. Bowra, and W. F. Jackson Knight (Horsfall 1995: 192n8; Hahn 1925; Bowra 1933; Knight 1944: 299–328), but that just pushes the objection back a couple of generations. An often-quoted passage from Lactantius (Div. Inst. 5.10.9) that challenges Aeneas's piety strikes me as relevant (Wlosok 1983: 63–68), but there is a lot of ground between Lactantius and the twentieth century, and anyway one passage does not constitute a tradition.

In an important book that opened the door to a real answer to this problem, Richard Thomas (2001) argued that the pessimistic interpretation has its roots in antiquity, and that efforts to buttress an optimistic reading can be found in John Dryden's influential 1697 translation; in nineteenth-century philology's revision and excision of disquieting passages; and in the responses of advocates and opponents of twentieth-century fascism. This is beginning to look like a tradition, and since Thomas's book appeared, a number of other scholars have worked to identify similar responses in other eras. Joseph C. Sitterson, Jr., for example, has argued that the ending of Lodovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, which was a bestseller in its day, replays the ending of the Aeneid in all its ambiguity and complexity (Sitterson 1992). I have argued elsewhere that the long-obscured Vergilian foundation of Shakespeare's The Tempest challenges an optimistic reading of the Aeneid by presenting a world in which lust and anger always lurk below the surface and threaten [End Page 85] to overwhelm reason, compassion, and forgiveness at any moment. In a similar way, I believe that a nuanced reading of Paradise Lost against the Aeneid reveals a poem in which the reader is initially deceived into identifying Satan with Aeneas, but should then settle on Adam as the new Aeneas who, like his model, allowed passion to invert his priorities temporarily and must then head out into the world knowing that success will, eventually, always be accompanied by failure (Kallendorf 2007: 102–26, 138–69).

All three of these examples are from vernacular literature, so the skeptic could argue that these interpretations may be correct but the Latin tradition is different from the vernacular one. To this objection I would offer two responses. The first...

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