The Aeneid (6 page)

The ruse works. Turnus hears the sounds of despair from the city and realizes that his sister has misled him. In a speech of great nobility he accepts the truth and resolves to return and confront Aeneas. The moment Aeneas hears the name of Turnus he abandons his attack on the city. The armies part to clear a space. The gods leave the field and what we see at the last is two men fighting. Turnus is wounded and begs for mercy for the sake of his father. At this Aeneas wavers, no doubt remembering his own father and also how he suffered when he killed Lausus, but then he catches sight of the belt which Turnus had plundered from the dead body of Pallas, the boy who had been given into his charge, and in a blaze of raging anger he plunges his sword into the breast of his defenceless enemy. Revenge is part of war, as Augustus knew. As a boy he had won the support of the legions by promising to avenge their beloved Caesar, and over the years he had hunted down every last one of the conspirators, formally recording his revenge at the beginning of his
Res Gestae
. Virgil passes no judgement on Aeneas. He describes it as it would have been.

Meanwhile Juno, the greatest liar in the
Aeneid
, has not been idle. It is she who had suborned Juturna to go to the aid of Turnus in a speech which begins, as usual in rhetoric, with flattery, proceeds to self-justification and ends by urging Juturna into action while offering her no hope. But because Juno is trying to avoid responsibility, her instructions are so deviously expressed that Juturna barely understands them. Juno then loses patience and has to tell her straight out to go to rescue her brother or else stir up a war to block the signing of the treaty. When the arrow wounds Aeneas, no man knows who shot it, but we know who was responsible, and so does Jupiter, as at the end of the
Aeneid
he smiles at his wife’s evasions.

This final interview between Juno and Jupiter is the solution to a central problem of the
Aeneid
, how the Roman empire is to be established against the opposition of Juno. The settlement is arranged in the final act of the divine comedy which has run through the whole poem. Although Juno has told Juturna that she cannot bear to watch the battle, Jupiter sees her doing so. He speaks affectionately to her, and then teases her gently: ‘What do you hope to achieve by perching there in those chilly clouds?’ He knows precisely what, and she knows that he knows. He then changes tack and pleads with her in loving terms: ‘Do not let this great sorrow gnaw at your heart in silence, and do not make me listen to grief and resentment for ever streaming from your sweet lips.’ He then reminds her of what she has achieved. At the last, after the affection and the praise, the command: ‘I forbid you to go further’ (791–806).

Juno submits, but not before a flood of bluster, face-saving and self-justification: ‘I, Juno, yield and quit these battles which I so detest’ (818). Having yielded, she now lays down her stipulations. Her essential point is that she will allow these Trojan men to settle in Italy and marry Italian wives, but only on condition that they forfeit all trace of their Trojan origins. Now we understand why the Trojan women had to be left in Sicily at the end of Book 5. Now we understand how the
repeated slur of effeminacy is to be erased from the reputation of these incomers from the East. The Trojans are to lose their name and become Latins. They are to dress in the Italian style and give up their Oriental flounces, so mocked by Numanus Remulus in Book 9. The Alban kings are to rule from generation to generation, and we see that the wheel has come full circle. At the opening of the poem we were told that the
Aeneid
would reveal the origins of the Alban fathers. Now we remember that the Alban kings, like Augustus, are Julians, descended from Iulus. Juno’s last stipulation is the final cleansing of the bloodstock of the Trojans. Rome is to be made mighty by the manly virtue of Italy,
sit Romana potens Itala virtute propago
.
Vir
is the Latin for ‘man’, and
virtute
is the Latin for manly virtue (‘manly courage’ in the text, 827), so this blend of blood will finally erase all trace of Oriental effeminacy from the founders of Rome. ‘Troy has fallen. Let it lie, Troy and the name of Troy’ (828).

‘He who devised mankind and all the world smiled’, and, remarkably, he goes on to remind Juno of their double relationship, brother and sister, husband and wife. He accepts her stipulations and adds his own details. The language of the new people will not be Trojan, but Latin. The overtones of Jupiter’s formulation are important. Latin was superseding the native tongues of Italy as the
lingua franca
of commerce, law and government. When Jupiter says that Ausonia (an ancient name for Italy) will keep the tongue of its fathers, he is suggesting some sort of justification for Latin against the languages which it is supplanting all over Italy. Throughout this dialogue of the gods Virgil is making his legend more plausible by linking it to known contemporary facts.

Jupiter will also provide ritual and modes of worship, another ingenious element. At the fall of Troy, Aeneas had been given a solemn charge to establish the Trojan gods in a new city. But Virgil does not wish to argue that the gods of Augustan Rome came from the East. Nor does he want Aeneas to negotiate away the gods which were his sacred responsibility, and capitulate to the Latins in a matter of such central importance in the
Aeneid
. The ingenuity of Virgil’s solution to this problem lies in the fact
that Aeneas capitulates not to any man but to Jupiter, the supreme god of the Romans. No one could object to a religious ordinance imposed by Jupiter Best and Greatest. The discussion between Jupiter and Juno ends with his assurance that the Romans will surpass all men in piety and also all gods, a prophecy which is less astonishing than it seems, if we recollect that obedience to just authority is part of
pietas
, and that the gods have not always excelled in that virtue. In particular – his last assurance – no other race will be the equals of the Romans in doing honour to Juno.

Jupiter has the last word. Juno seems to have the last gesture. The Latin, like all Latin, is untranslatable, literally, ‘Rejoicing, she twisted back her mind’ (841). Juno then did in the end change her mind, but clearly, she found it a bitter-sweet experience. The domestic dispute is thus resolved. Turnus will be killed. Aeneas will marry Lavinia and found Lavinium, and world history will proceed according to the decisions of this humorous discussion between a god and his wife.

Divine machinery is an obsolete literary device, but it gives a great sweep of human interest to the
Aeneid
and as a dramatic representation of ordinary human relations and of the unpredictable in life, the place of justice in the world, the limits of human effort and understanding and the inscrutable splendour of the universe, it is not a bad model.

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Virgil
, New Surveys in the Classics 28 (Oxford University Press for the Classical Association, 1998)

W. S. Anderson,
The Art of the
Aeneid (reprinted Bristol Classical Press, 1994)

W. A. Camps,
An Introduction to Virgil’s
Aeneid (Oxford University Press, 1969)

K. W. Gransden,
Virgil’s
Iliad (Cambridge University Press, 1984)

J. Griffin,
Virgil
(Oxford University Press, 1986)

R. Jenkyns,
Classical Epic: Homer and Virgil
(Bristol Classical Press, 1992)

N. Horsfall (ed.),
A Companion to the Study of Virgil
(Brill, 1995)

C. Martindale (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Virgil
(Cambridge University Press, 1997)

K. Galinsky,
Augustan Culture
(Princeton University Press, 1996)

P. Zanker,
The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus
, tr. A. Shapiro (Michigan University Press, 1988)

S. Commager (ed.),
Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays
(from studies published 1945–64) (Prentice-Hall, 1966)

P. Hardie (ed.),
Virgil: Critical Assessments of Classical Authors
(1901–95), 4 vols. (Routledge, 1999)

S. J. Harrison (ed.),
Oxford Readings in Vergil’s
Aeneid (1933–87) (Oxford University Press, 1990)

I. McAuslan and P. Walcot (eds.),
Virgil
(1972–86) (Oxford University Press for the Classical Association, 1990)

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Vergil’s
Aeneid:
Augustan Epic and Political Context
(Conference Proceedings) (Duckworth, 1998)

D. L. Drew,
The Allegory of the
Aeneid (Blackwell, 1927)

R. Heinze,
Virgil’s Epic Technique
, tr. H. and D. Harvey and F. Robertson (Bristol Classical Press, 1993)

E. Henry,
The Vigour of Prophecy
(Southern Illinois University Press, 1989)

R. O. A. M. Lyne,
Words and the Poet
(Oxford University Press, 1989)

K. Quinn,
Virgil’s
Aeneid: A
Critical Description
(Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968)

G. Williams,
Technique and Ideas in the
Aeneid (Yale University Press, 1983)

The text used, with very few exceptions, is the Oxford Classical Text by Sir Roger Mynors. The numbers in the margin refer to the line numbers of the Latin. Latin being a very compact language, ten lines of Virgil (given in the margin) have often required more than ten in the translation.

Received wisdom, as represented by
The Proceedings of the Virgil Society
19(1988), 14, states that ‘to translate poetry into prose is always a folly’. I believe that this view does less than justice to the range, power and music of contemporary English prose. As written by our best novelists and journalists and even sometimes by ordinary letter-writers, it daily moves us towards pity, terror or laughter, and does so more than the voices of contemporary poets. Further – this is ungentle but the argument requires that it be said – the English poets who have translated the
Aeneid
since Dryden have not done well. We may accept that poetic translation need not be true to the tone or detail of the original. A poet’s first concern is with his own poem. But if we grant this freedom, we must then judge their works as poems, and as such the poetic translations of the
Aeneid
are low in interest and inspiration.

The ruling prose version is Jackson Knight’s Penguin Classic of 1956. This is lovingly faithful to the author’s vision of Virgil but the language is dated. It would be difficult to disagree with Sandbach’s judgement in
The Proceedings of the Virgil Society
10(1970–71), 35 (reprinted in
Meminisse Iuvabit
(1989), ed. F. Robertson): ‘…too often the attempt to grasp and represent each of Virgil’s words has pushed aside the need to give the
sentence rhythm and cohesion and the emphasis that goes with form’.

The object of this translation has been to write readable English which does honour to the richness and sublimity of Virgil’s language – ebullient, for example in the utterances of Aeneas at the games in Book 5, charged with grief for the death of Marcellus at the end of Book 6 and ringing with the courage and cruelty of war in the four great last books. Another impossible task. But if it is to be attempted, the translator must be ready to jettison the idiom of Latin and search for the English words that will carry as much as possible of the spirit of the Latin.

                I sing of arms and of the man, fated to be an exile, who long
                since left the land of Troy and came to Italy to the shores of
                Lavinium; and a great pounding he took by land and sea at the
                hands of the heavenly gods because of the fierce and unforgetting
                anger of Juno. Great too were his sufferings in war before he
                could found his city and carry his gods into Latium. This was
                the beginning of the Latin race, the Alban fathers and the high
                walls of Rome. Tell me, Muse, the causes of her anger. How did
                he violate the will of the Queen of the Gods? What was his
10           offence? Why did she drive a man famous for his piety to such
                endless hardship and such suffering? Can there be so much
                anger in the hearts of the heavenly gods?

                There was an ancient city held by colonists from Tyre, opposite
                Italy and the distant mouth of the river Tiber. It was a city
                of great wealth and ruthless in the pursuit of war. Its name was
                Carthage, and Juno is said to have loved it more than any other
                place, more even than Samos. Here the goddess kept her armour.
                Here was her chariot, and this was the city she had long
20           favoured, intending to give it sovereignty over the peoples of
                the earth, if only the Fates would allow it. But she had heard
                that there was rising from the blood of Troy a race of men who
                in days to come would overthrow this Tyrian citadel; a people
                proud in war and rulers of a great empire would come to sack
                the land of Libya; this is the destiny the Fates were unrolling.
                These were the fears of the daughter of Saturn, and she had not
                forgotten the war she had fought long since at Troy for her
                beloved Argos, nor had her bitter resentment and the reasons
                for it ever left her mind. There still rankled deep in her heart the
                
judgement of Paris and the injustice of the slight to her beauty,
                her loathing for the whole stock of Dardanus and her fury at
                the honours done to Ganymede, whom her husband Jupiter had
                carried off to be his cup-bearer. With all this fuelling her anger
30           she was keeping the remnants of the Trojans, those who had
                escaped the savagery of Achilles and the Greeks, far away from
                Latium, driven by the Fates to wander year after year round all
                the oceans of the world. So heavy was the cost of founding the
                Roman race.