On
the anniversary of Virgil’s death in 19 BCE, the poet who (like so many from
antiquity) dazzles me with his artistry while making me feel politically squeamish,
I’ve returned to the old chestnut: how nearly complete was the Aeneid? The tradition that Virgil had not completed it
and was not happy with it being published unrevised goes back to a biography
written in the fourth century CE by a grammarian called Aelius Donatus.
This biography may contain earlier material (but not therefore necessarily more
reliable) written by Suetonius. It certainly includes bits of text added by
other scholars subsequent to Donatus.
The
main evidence that the poem was unfinished consists of the 57 incomplete lines
spread across all 12 books but particularly concentrated in books 2-5, 7 and
9-10.
Donatus
says that Virgil went to Greece, planning a three-year stay to finish the epic.
He asked his friend Varius to burn the Aeneid if anything happened to
him. He fell ill in Greece, returned to the Italian port city of Brindisi, and
died there, having tried and failed to have the manuscripts burned. Varius
published them anyway ‘acting under the authority of Augustus. But they were
revised only in a cursory fashion, so that if there were any unfinished lines,
he left them unfinished’.
There
have been several responses to this information. People who think Virgil was quietly
subversive towards Augustus and the Roman Empire suppose that he had fallen out
of love with the propagandist aspects of the poem and so considered destroying
it. This premise informed the famous 1945 novel The Death of Virgil by Hermann
Broch, which explores the difficulties faced by an artist under totalitarianism.
Others
have said that Virgil knew he wanted to adjust or supplement the ideological
import of the poem to make it either more anti- or pro-Augustus. Sometimes they cite a passage interpolated
into Donatus’ account, which says that ‘if he had lived longer, Virgil would
have written 24 books, up to the time of Augustus, and that he meant…to deal
with the deeds of Augustus in detail’.
But
I am not alone in thinking that at least some of the ‘unfinished’ lines were
actually finished. The truncation of the metrical flow often adds pathos or
rhetorical emphasis.
When the Trojans take the momentous decision to drag the wooden horse into the city, the moment just before Aeneas says ‘we parted the walls and laid bare the city’s battlements’ is preceded by the ominous pause created by a missing half-line (2.233).
When
Aeneas brutally tells Dido to stop harassing him with her complaints, ‘for I’m
not trying to get to Italy of my own volition’, the impact his emotional brutality
has on Dido is arguably increased, again, by the thudding silence of the
missing metrical feet (4.361).
In
the final book, when Turnus, who has lost some of his dearest friends in
battle, is upbraided by his disguised sister for not attacking hard enough, a
pause precedes the tragic soliloquy in which he accepts that his violent death
is now imminent and inevitable (12.630). It is as if he is drawing a very deep breath.
One thing is for certain, if the human race survives what it is currently doing to the planet, and unless a wholly unexpected and reliable new source turns up for what went on in Brindisi just before and on 21st September 19 BCE, we will be arguing about Virgil’s aesthetic and political intentions in the Aeneid for a good few millennia to come.
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| The Tomb of Virgil' by Joseph Wright of Derby |
When I got my iPod and played music of "shuffle" I was amazed at the brilliant juxtapositions and song-lists produced randomly by the little thing.
ReplyDeleteThese are all great observations about how some half-lines work great as they stand, and I have argued that there is very little about the Aeneid that needed to be fixed (since some of its inconsistencies can be seen as deliberate or functional).
Here's another great one I have discussed in print:
"The one half-line that is not a syntactically complete clause can also be seen as effective and moving. Hector’s widow Andromache, whom Aeneas has found living in Greece, asks whether his son Ascanius still lives: quid puer Ascanius? superatne et uescitur aura?/ quem tibi iam Troia 3.339-40 “What about the boy Ascanius? Does he survive and breathe the air above? Whom to you Troy (or ‘Trojan…’)…” It is easy for us to imagine Andromache being unable to speak Creusa’s name, not only because of Aeneas’ loss of his wife but especially because Aeneas’ son Ascanius must call to mind her own dead son Astyanax."
But I don't think there is any real reason to think half-lines were a poetic choice Vergil made, instead of a gift from fate, like my iPod song-lists. One strong argument is that no other poet, among all of those influenced by Vergil, ever used this (except maybe some centoists?). If you look for a precedent you can cite the passage in Catullus 51 where that poet’s notoriously flawed manuscripts have a missing short line right where the speaker says his voice breaks off when he looks at Lesbia. But is the a good argument?
Basically no ancient readers operated with a horizon of expectations that would have prepared them to treat half-lines as a deliberate poetic device.
I like Goold's argument that Vergil seemed to have composed in bunches of verses, that later needed to be joined together. Often the join is at mid-line, and if the two pieces did not fit together some writing or rewriting had to be done.
I love the way the start of our extant Satyricon introduces some major themes and characters, and also fools into thinking the speaker is sincere instead of just trying to get a dinner invitation. But was it the start of the ancient novel? Probably not.