Didactic voices in Vergil's Aeneid

Book Chapter

Reference

Didactic voices in Vergil's Aeneid

NELIS, Damien Patrick

NELIS, Damien Patrick. Didactic voices in Vergil's Aeneid. In: Raymond, E. Vox poetae : manifestations auctoriales dans l'épopée gréco-latine : actes du colloque organisé les 13 et 14 novembre 2008 par l'Université Lyon 3 . Paris : De Boccard, 2011. p.

275-283

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Didactic voices in Vergil's Aeneid

Damien P. NELIS University of Geneva

According to Hammond, who heard it out on a spree

From a man who had known the priest who was chaplain on duty The morning the last man was hanged in Crumlin Road Jail, W'hat the man said as he shook hands and went to the hangman Was, 'Father, this is going to be a lesson to me.'

Seamus Heaney, 'Ten Glosses', Electric Light (2001).

A re-reading of Brooks Otis's definition and analysis of what he called Vergil's 'subjective style' provokes a renewed sense of admiration for the way in which, building on the work of Richard Heinze, he grasped an essential element of the literary texture of the Aeneid and attempted to demonstrate how it functioned in relation both to the work's grand thematic structures and the intricate niceties ofVergilian style. Certainly, no one interested in the question of poetic voice in the poem can afford to ignore Otis's work, since his whole approach relies on a reading model imagining a constant, all-controlling narratorial voice guiding and manipulating the reader's response to the text. But equally, anyone interested in this subject today must also confront a very large body of scholarship bent on refining this approach, as it has of course long been recognised that Otis's famous discussion of subjective style fails to do justice to many of the complexities of Vergilian technique^1• As a result, subsequent research has subjected to detailed analysis numerous aspects of Vergilian narrative, and studies of focalisation and polyphony, internal narrators, ecphrasis, complex allusion, stylistic register, figures of speech, metapoetics and much else have contributed greatly to our appreciation of the brilliant complexity of the

Sincere thanks are due to Emmanuelle Raymond and Bruno Bureau for the invitation to Lyon and for all their support. Thanks also to Joe Farrell for very helpful advice and encouragement.

1 See G. B. Conte (2007: p. 49-57).

DIDACTIC VOICES IN VERGIL'S AENEID

narratorial voice behind this astonishing poem^{2 •} Furthermore, the use of the terminology of poetic voice in relation to the Aeneid is now indissociable from two profoundly influential interpretations of Vergilian poetry, Adam Parry's paper 'The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid' and Oliver Lyne's book Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid3. In this paper, however, I would like to focus on just one small section of this broad canvas, and that is the question of the relationship between the authorial voice which Vergil begins constructing right from his initial use of the first-person cano and the didactic genre4• I will first look briefly at the ways in which the opening scenes of the Aeneid confront the reader with a series of possible epic models and various narrative modes. Then, I will focus on the presence of didactic elements in the figures of Iopas and Anchises, before going on to suggest that the profoundly programmatic opening simile of the poem signals the presence of a didactic function lurking in the work as a whole. To read the Aeneid is to receive a lesson about some of the harsh political realities of the Roman world of the 20s BCE.

Arma uirumque cano : Homer, epos and alternatives

In the opening eleven verses of the Aeneid, it is primarily direct allusion which helps to create the perception that Vergil is composing a poem which invites comparison with the Homeric epics^5• The opening words, arma uirumque cano, as is very well known, instantly plug the poem into the Homeric circuits of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. But the first-person verb and the absence of the Muse simultaneously recall more closely post-Homeric proems. Vergil is working with a vision of both Homer and the epic tradition seen as the reception of Homer. As they do so, these three words start a seven-line sentence which takes Aeneas and the reader from Troy, the first word immediately after cano, to Rome, the final word of line seven. Much of the content of this sentence relates overtly to the Odyssey and the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, closely inter- related epics of heroic voyaging, while its form simultaneously invokes the Iliad, an epic of warfare which also begins with a sentence of seven lines ending with the key word 'Achilles'^{6 .} Instantly, strands of intertextual narratives are set in

2 D. Fowler (1997) and A. Barchiesi (1997a) provide brilliant surveys. G. B. Conte (2007) offers a magisterial overview. For a sophisticated and enlightening treatment of some aspects of the Greek background concerning the poet's voice, see S. Goldhill ( 1991).

1 A. Parry (1963) = (1966), R. 0. A. M. Lyne (1987) ; see also the summary at Ph. Hardie (1998 : p. 94-101).

•1 Didactic, a type of epos, is of course notoriously hard to define ; for excellent discussion see K. Volk (2002 : p. 34-43). For the purposes of this paper I will assume that in the Aeneid Vergil is operating on the basis that didactic poetry is a particular form of hexameter epos which through allusion can be constructed as a coherent tradition running from the Georgics back to its central models, Lucretius, Aratus, Empedocles, Hesiod and Homer read allegorically as a scientific poet of nature; see in general Ph. Hardie (1986), J. Farrell (1991), L. Morgan (1999). On the issue of generic interaction in Vergil, see now S. Harrison (2007). Indispensable for the Greek background is M. Fantuzzi and R. L. Hunter (2004: chap. 1).

' On allusion and the use of different kinds of elements or poetic features in defining generic boundaries, particularly in relation to didactic poetry and its presence in the Aeneid see D. Fowler (2000b).

" See D. P. Nelis (2001 : p. 270-274).

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DAMIEN P. NELIS

motion which start from Achilles and Troy and from Odysseus and the theme of nostos, or return home, and run on to Aeneas, Italy, the foundations of Lavinium, Alba Longa, Rome and to the rise of the latter to a position of fame and power (altae moenia Romae, Aen. 1, 7). As a result, the poem initiates both its Homeric and Augustan receptions, but also situates itself in relation to the traditions of post-Homeric epic and the Roman historical tradition as embraced in Ennius' Annales.

These eleven verses, therefore, contain enormous generic force, and they have helped to define the very nature of epic poetry. They also form the basis for the construction of a vision of the whole Greco-Roman epic tradition from a Vergilian point of view as, on one level, the Aeneid constructs itself as the culmination of that coherent tradition and invites a conservative and classicizing reception. But on another level, Vergil is also launching into a profoundly insightful investigation of the varied nature and continuous development of the epic tradition from Homer right down to the Georgics. And in doing so, he makes that tradition look much less coherent and unified and so allows us to appreciate the Aeneid as an idiosyncratic and modernist text7.

In Latin poetry, the word arma often acts as a kind of name tag, a way of referring to epic poetry8• In the seventh poem of his first book, Propertius, wishing to delineate the genre of epic in opposition to elegy, refers to it thus (1- 5) :

Dum tibi Cadmeae dicuntur, Pontice, Thebae armaque fraternae tn'stia militiae, atque, ita simfelix, primo contendis Homero

(sint modo f ata tuis mollia carminibus), nos, ut consuemus, nostros agitamus amores,

The arma of Ponticus are opposed to the amores of Propertius. Within the Aeneid itself, the combination of arma and virum becomes a way of referring both to the epic genre as a whole and to the text itself. At line 119 of the first book the line-opening arma uirum (even if the latter is a genitive plural) can be read as referring to the Aeneid: if June's storm succeeds in destroying the Trojan fleet the plot of the epic projected in the poem's first sentence will come to an immediate halt, and there will be no more 'arms of men' nor will there be an Aeneid, which could be identified by the alternative title of its first two words, 'the arms and the man'9• Famously, in stating the works fundamentally Iliadic nature, Propertius, in a poem traditionally dated to the mid-twenties BCE, displays his knowledge of the proem (2, 34, 61-66) :

Actia Vergilium custodis litora Phoebi, Caesaris et Jortis dicere posse ratis,

1 See D. Feeney (1991 : p. 129-132).

• See A. Barchiesi (1997b : p. 16-19, 27-28, 176), J. Ziolkowski and M. C. J. Putnam (2008 : p. 23- 24).

As at Ovid, Tn'stia 2, 533-534; on amia uirumque as a way of referring to the Aeneid and as a statement of generic essentialism see S. Hinds (2000 : p. 234).

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DIDACTIC VOICES IN VERGIL'S AENEID

qui nunc Aeneae Troiani suscitat arma iactaque Lavinis moenia litoribus.

cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Grai I nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade.

Each of the highlighted words is to be found in Aeneid 1, 1-7, arma, Troiae, qui, Laviniaque, litora, iactatus, moenia. Again, in his third book, Propertius begins the fourth poem with the word Arma, and adds uiri (3) and cano (9), each time in precisely the same metrical locus as his model, to reveal his knowledge of Vergil's incipit10• Even more strikingly, Ovid opens his Amores with the word Arma, explicitly using it to delineate the epic genre, once again, like Propertius, in opposition to love elegy. By referring to heroic epic as poetry about arma it is easy, if tendentious, to construct an image of uncontaminated generic purity11 . But within the Vergilian corpus as a whole, the Aeneid's opening words must be seen in light of the poet's earlier claims.

In the Eclogues (6, 3-7), looking back to an unwritten epic, Vergil had defined the genre in terms of reges et proelia, laudes and tristia ... bella, before making Apollo reject totally the idea of such themes. In the Georgics he had returned to the idea of writing an epic, offering two possibilities. The first, at the end of book 2, is about the nature and science and relates itself to the didactic tradition including Empedocles, Aratus and Lucretius. Then, at the beginning of book 3, he looks instead to what looks like a historical epic about Caesar in the tradition of Ennius, while alluding at the same time to Pindaric and C allimachean epinician 12. Suddenly, epic form no longer looks so homogeneous.

The opening of the Aeneid, however, is emphatically not an On Nature nor a Caesareid and neither lyric nor elegiac in form, but looks instead ostentatiously Homeric and Apollonian. But in fact we will soon encounter a series of clear distinctions between different kinds of epic and different narrative possibilities.

Vrbs antiqua juit ... (Aen. 1, 12). The word 'city' here is in fact a possible epic opening. The Thebaid of the Epic Cycle began with 'Argos sing, goddess .. ', while the Little Iliad began with 'Ilios I sing ... '. But more immediately, Vrbs picks up the conderet urbem of line 5, with the surprise that on this occasion Vergil is talking not about Lavinium, Alba Longa or Rome, but about Carthage, named prominently in enjambement in verse 13 13 . Juno wishes to prevent the destruction of her beloved city and in order to do so she must prevent the foundation of Lavinium by the Trojans. The Aeneid then is a ktistic epic, but one which recounts a foundation that Juno is desperate to prevent. In her vision, the Aeneid must be a typical Greek nostos narrative, not a replay of the successful return of Odysseus but instead another disastrous return, like that of Ajax, whose

"' See F. Cairns (2003).

" See S. Hinds (2000) ; very important also is S. Hinds (1992) on arma in Ovid's Fasci.

12 For discussion of these alternatives see D. P. Nelis (2004). On Vergilian sensitivity in defining different kinds of epic see the two important contributions by A. Deremetz (2000) and (2001). A great deal of work has been devoted to exploring the presence of heroic epic in didactic epos ; see especially J. Farrell (1991). Important also is L. Morgan (1999).

13 Joe Farrell has pointed out to me that just as the the Roman epic begins on one level with Carthage, so the Theban epic begins with Atgos.

DAMIEN P. NELIS

terrible death at the hands of Athena she uses as an exemplum in lines 39-451

4.

But soon, Venus will retaliate with her own exemplum, linking Aeneas to Antenor and his successful Trojan nostos (242-249)15 . Jupiter immediately assents to this parallel and in his great prophecy (257-296) explains how the story of the Trojan Aeneas will glide into Roman history, and thus into Roman historical epic. His speech covers Ennian ground and in doing so alludes to the prologue of the third book of the Georgics, when line 286, nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar recalls Georgics 3, 48, Tithoni prima quot abest ab origine Caesar. In both cases the collocation of Caesar and the origin or beginning raises directly questions about choice of narrative form and the issue of generic propriety. If this is to be Vergil's chosen subject matter, how exactly is he going to link the two ? Given this beginning and this end, what form will his narrative take and how is he to impose unity on such a vast story¹⁶?

The opening scenes of the Aeneid, therefore, are intensely self-reflexive, as the narrator's chosen path is in various ways either contested or compared to other possible epic modes. The poem's initially dominant Odyssean narrative impulse 17 combines references to Iliadic warfare and Achillean anger, narratives of city-foundation (Lavinium etc.), a tragic Greek nostos (Ajax), successful Greek and Trojan nostoi (Argonauts and Antenor, the latter merging into a ktistic narrative against a background of colonisation narratives) ¹⁸ and the subject matter of Ennian historical epic. And while all this raising of distinctions between various kinds of epic is going on, the opening scenes of the poem, with the great storm raised by Juno and Aeolus, as well as reworking closely storm narratives in Odyssey 5 and Argonautica 4, is steeped in allusion to Lucretius 19. In creating his description of the great storm Vergil draws both on traditional epic narratives involving divine intervention and on Lucretius' atheist and scientific explanations of natural phenomena. In doing so, he remythologises Lucretius by showing how he is perfectly aware of the reworking of traditional epic motifs in the De Rerum Natura. The coherent intertextual nexus involving Homeric and Lucretian allusion is so tightly related because Vergil is able to read Homer as a poet of nature and Lucretius as an epic uates writing in the tradition of heroic story- telling20. On the one hand, the traditional classification of all hexameter poetry as epos is in operation, while on the other the reader must also be aware of generic markers which activate distinctions between different kinds of epic, and in the

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'" See D. P. Nelis (2004: p. 90-91).

17 See F. Cairns (1989 : chap. 8).

" See N. M. Horsfall (1989).

" See Ph. Hardie (1986 : chap. 5). See also Ph. Hardie (2005 : p. 19-20) for possible Lucretian reflexes already in the prologue.

20 In a closely related way, he is also able to emphasize if necessary the scientific elements in Apollonius Rhodius and Ennius; see Ph. Hardie (1986 : p. 76-83) on the latter and on the former D. P. Nelis (2001 : p. 96-112).

DIDACTIC VOICES IN VERGIL'S A EN EID

storm scene between specifically epic and didactic forms. This dialogue must of course be seen in the context of the generic polyphony of the Aeneid as a whole.

As is well known, there is a significant amount of tragic, elegiac, lyric and historiographical material in the poem, not to mention epigrammatic, hymnic and pastoral elements. And on two occasions in particular Vergil highlights his use of the didactic mode^{21 :}

lopas ... docuit quern maximus Atlas (Aen. 1, 740-741);

te tuafata docebo (Aen. 6, 759).

At the end of Aeneid 1 the bard lopas entertains the guests at Dido's banquet with a song about cosmology (7 42-7 46) :

hie canit errantem lunam solisque labores ;

unde hominum genus et pecudes ; unde imber et ignes ; Arcturum pluuiasque Hyadas geminosque Triones;

quid tantum Oceano properent se tinguere soles hiberni, uel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet.

Strikingly, two of these lines are quoted directly from the passage in Georgics 2 in which Vergil, or, more precisely, the didactic lesson's narratorial voice, imagines a possible poem on cosmology (481-482):

quid tantum Oceano properent se tingere soles hiberni, uel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet.

This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the complexities of the song of lop as, but a couple of points are worth making²². The placing of the song at the end of book and immediately before Aeneas' narrative of his adventures gives it evident programmatic force. Not only will the reader appreciate immediately in the second book the links between Iopas' account of the creation of the cosmic orbis and Aeneas' narrative of the destruction of the Trojan urbs, she will also go on to understand how Iopas' performance acts as a kind of cosmic ouverture for the whole epic, contextualising the whole 'cosmos and imperium' approach to the understanding of the poem²³. It is precisely this approach which is emphasized in the work's second full-scale interaction with the discourse of didactic, in the song of Anchises in the sixth book. Here we have a passage steeped in allusion to Lucretius and fitted out with specific markers of

21 See S. J. Harrison (2007 and esp. p. 232-240) on didactic elements in the Aeneid, most specifically on the reworking of material from the Georgics ; see also on the reworking of the Georgics in the Aeneid D. P. Nelis (1992) and more generally J. Farrell (1991 : p. 25-332); and on the closely related issue of Lucretian influence in the Georgics see Gale (2000). On the Aeneid's generic polyphony see the summary at Ph. Hardie (1998 : p. 57-63.) It is one of the central paradoxes of the poem that it manages to convey an impression of generic puriry while embracing a great deal of non-epic material; see S. Hinds (2000).

22 On lopas see D. P. Nelis (2001: p. 96-112). Note also that Aeneid 1,742 reworks closely Georgics 2, 478, defectus solis uan·os lunaeque labores.

" See P. Hardie (1986, 1998: p. 92-94).

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DAMIEN P. NELIS

the didactic style^24. Again also, the passage is of enormous importance for the interpretation of the whole epic, since it too, like that involving Iopas, has a programmatic function. The way in which Anchises describes to his son the fate of the individual human soul within a cycle of reincarnations provides the setting for the revelation of the future history of Rome and its heroes who are awaiting birth. Once more, the material looks to Ennian precedent, and once more also narratives of scientific knowledge and heroic glory combine in such a way as to inscribe the history of Rome and, climactically, Augustan empire in a philosophical account of the nature of the human soul. In a very similar manner, the song of Iopas provides a philosophical account of the nature of the cosmic fabric within which the mythic and historical actions of the epic are played out.

There is in the Aeneid another passage which I think can be read as a programmatic statement of the importance of the didactic strand running thought the whole poem. Vergil conceived of the Aeneid as a text which could teach Romans important lessons both in relation to their past and their future. At every level, this poem engages with the realities and discourses of the decade during which it was being written. It offers images of civil war and the hope for peace ; it reflects and in some cases invents Augustan ideology as expressed elsewhere through religion and monuments, the rewriting of the past and the expression of new identities and the investigation of the nature of Romanitas in a Romanised world. And the text's didactic thrust is stated in its opening simile.

Both the preceding narrative and the simile itself are worth quoting in full, in order to appreciate the precision with which Vergil makes his point (1, 124-156):

Interea rnagno misceri murmure pontum, ernissamque hiemem sensit Neptunus, et irnis stagna refusa uadis, grauiter commotus ; et alto prospiciens, surnrna placidum caput extulit unda.

disiectam Aeneae, toto uidet aequore classern, fluctibus oppressos Troas caelique ruina, nee latuere dolifratrem Iunonis et irae.

Burum ad se Zephyrumque uocat, dehinc talia fatur: 'tantane uos generis tenuit fiducia uestri ?

iam caelum terramque meo sine numine, uenti, miscere, et tantas audetis tollere moles ?

quos ego - sed motos praestat componere fluctus.

post rnihi non sirnili poena commissa luetis.

maturate fugarn, regique haec dicite uestro : non illi imperiurn pelagi saeuurnque tridentern, sed mihi sorte datum. tenet ille immania saxa, uestras, Eure, domos; ilia se iactet in aula Aeolus, et clauso uentorum carcere regnet'.

sic ait, et dicto citius turnida aequora placat, collectasque fugat nubes, solemque reducit.

Cymothoe simul et Triton adnixus acuto detrudunt nauis scopulo; leuat ipse tridenti;

et uastas aperit Syrtis, et temperat aequor, atque rotis summas leuibus perlabitur undas.

ac ueluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est seditio, saeuitque animis ignobile uulgus,

2'1 See Ph. Hardie (1986 : p. 69-83), D. Fowler (2000b : p. 206-207).

281

125

130

135

140

145

DIDACTIC VOICES IN VERGIL'S AENEID

iamque faces et sax a uolant, f uror arm a ministrat;

tum, pietate grauem ac meritis siforte uirum quern conspexere, silent, arrectisque aun'bus adstant;

ille regit dictis animos, et pectora mulcet:

sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor, aequora postquam prospiciens genitor caeloque inuectus aperto jlectit equos, curruque uolans dat lora secundo.

150

155

The immediate point of the comparison is obvious : Neptune calms the storm as the man calms the mob. If we look more closely, we can see that within the simile the arma and the uirum are in opposition. The implied relationship expressed in the poem's opening words, 'the arms and the man' here gives way to an adversative relationship, which may be expressed as 'the arms but the man'.

But why does Vergil use the words arma and uirum to recall the incipit2⁵? On one level, the antithesis between the image of 'the arms and the man' and that of 'the arms but the man' is in play right through to the very end of the poem, when Aeneas behaves in the end according to the former pattern, when he kills Turnus instead of stopping his blow²⁶• But more immediately, I believe that he does so with a specific point in mind : the man in question controls the rioting crowd with words, dictis. Within the immediate context and the multiple correspondences established between simile and narrative this word must relate to the short speech of Neptune in lines 132-141. But it is obvious that the import of this connection is much wider. When Vergil uses the expression regit dictis, he is inserting this simile into the whole nexus of references to the theme of kingship in the first book, and hence throughout the poem as a whole²⁷. His poem offers a fascinating analysis of the hierarchies and discourses and of the ambiguities and ironies involved in the use and abuse of political power in triumviral and early Augustan Rome. Obviously, the uir of the poem's opening simile stands as a figure of both Aeneas and Augustus. But Vergil is also inviting the force of the expression regit dictis to be reflected back onto the words of the Aeneid itself. On one level, therefore, the man in the simile is Vergil, whose Aeneid contains a message for the troubled Roman state : the words of this poem contain a potent lesson for a people coming to terms with decades of civil war and the inauguration of a new age of Augustan peace. And on another level, of course, the expression may be read as a reflection on the persuasive power of the Augustan discourse. Either way, the poem offers the possibility that of itself it can contribute to the preservation of peace and order after many chaotic years of civil strife.

In the Georgics Vergil negotiated his way to the elaboration of a new epic form with which he could confront the pressing issues of his times, so when he came to the Aeneid he did not fail to trust once more in the power of his didactic voice. Of that voice, Philip Hardie has written the following²⁸ :

21 Note that Vergil even goes so far as to use the very rare monosyallabic line-ending with the relative quem to rewrite the opening line : uirumque becomes uirum que(m) ; the final -m will of course have been nasalized and not pronounced as a bilabial, thus reinforcing the echo.

26 For a recent reading of the end in relation to the poem as a whole see M. C. J. Putnam (2005).

27 See F. Cairns (1989 : chaps. 1-3).

'" Ph. Hardie (2004: p. 110).

DAMIEN P. NELIS

' ... in the Georgics Virgil drags the didactic form out of its retreat in the Greek world of poetic tradition and philosophico-religious instruction, and sets it to work in the harsh political setting of triumviral Rome, implicitly defining the new ruler's task as that of educator and corrector, teacher and master, the new culture hero required by Rome.'

In the Aeneid, a narrative voice of enormous didactic authority takes on itself that very same task, that is to create an epic voice which would serve as the 'educator and corrector, teacher and master' of the Roman people.