Hmm. I see Williams too takes silici here as ablative. He compares capiti at 7.668, which at first sight—but only at first sight?—is dative. I’d like to see what Horsfall has to say. Next time I’m at a library I’ll take a look. Of course the form is unexpected, but is it out of the question? Nesrad’s little mnemonic has no lack of exceptions. He’s right to say the spark is in the flint—Aen.6.6 is the proof passage, semina flammae / abstrusa in venis silicis—but I had read silici scintillam excudit as meaning “he bashed a spark out of a flint” (a meaning Nesrad denies for the ablative with this verb, I’m not sure why), and I’m still not convinced that’s wrong. Though my feel for Vergil’s use of language is hopelessly inadequate (it’s easy to underestimate the strangeness of his language), something in me dislikes dative here. I won’t suggest it’s ambiguous, though Vergil does rather like ambiguity. (A very minor example—or analogous phenomenon—would be excudit here: first taken as present like the preceding series of verbs, retroactively as perfect.)
However that may be: Giving a step-by-step description of such a humble unepic activity as getting a fire started is distinctly hellenistic. As in a quite different way is the high mannerism of the next line, tum Cererem corruptam undis Ceraliaque arma …. You can understood why he was criticized for kakozelia.
#256-297 Jupiter’s prophecy to Venus, both imperial propaganda and utopia. It made me wonder whether anything is known about why Vergil wrote the Aeneid. Is it likely he was commissioned by Augustus or his entourage to write a national epic?
And there is Furor again!
Furor impius intus
Saeva sedens super arma et centum vinctus aenis
Post tergum nodis fremet horridus ore cruento.
You raise a question which lies at the heart of the Aeneid for many commentators. To what extent is it a celebration of imperial Augustan ideology or a subversion? Perhaps it is both. Virgil has been claimed both as a republican and an imperialist.What Virgil actually thought is not to my mind a question which can be sensibly be answered. On the other hand we have lots of information about how he was interpreted. Hardie’s The Last Trojan is an enjoyable survey of the Aeneid’s nachleben.
Thanks. But apart from the question what Vergil actually thought about these things, was he ‘ordered’ to write the Aeneid (a national epic on delivery so to say) or did he choose the subject himself? I guess the answer isn’t known, but maybe I’m wrong.
#353 Ipsa sed in somnis inhumati venit imago
coniugis, ora modis attollens pallida miris,
Ora must be the acc. plural of os, oris: a ‘poetic plural’, nothing uncommon. However, in this instance it seems strange, conjuring up images of an apparition with multiple faces. So, just to be sure, am I reading this correctly?
He wasn’t ordered, but there was some pressure in the circle of poets around Augustus and Maecenas that it would be most convenient should an epic be produced that would reflect the new regime. Horace (who introduced Virgil to the circle) supposedly was asked to do it by Maecenas, but he turned the offer down. Later on Virgil took that up upon himself. The choice of the argument was also a bit of a shock, since Aeneas had had but a minor role in the mythology until Virgil gives him pride of place in the typology of Roman History.
At any rate, the problems of influence or ideology go far beyond the question of whether or not someone could ever be commanded to write such a long and elaborate poem by imperial fiat. Rather, who was a part of Virgil’s circles? His friends, his patrons? What were his aesthetic and political positions? Who was paying for it? Those are the kind of questions that get asked in this context.
This is not to say that poets can’t be ordered to write poems for specific occasions (in the Augustan period, the Carmen Saeculare comes to mind), but, for poetry that is not written for a specific event or celebration, we find that poets write their works and then approach the powers that be that they may be recompensed, and that was the case of the Aeneid.
Ora, plural os. You are reading it correctly, but the use of “ora” as poetic plural is common enough that I don’t think anyone reading that would be led to think of “an apparition with multiple faces”. — Think English “Looks”.
It may be obvious but I feel I need to state it. I think that one has to be very sceptical about the tradition which has grown up around Virgil’s life. It’s impossible to decide what is based on contemporary testimony and what is later interpolation to fill out the meagre details. Further should we take at face value testimony from a period in which ideology seems to have manipulated the narrative of empire so extensively? Nevertheless you can read a translation of Virgil’s vita here http://virgil.org/vitae/
Refusing to write a long epic was a programmatic gesture adopted by a number of poets in Vergil’s milieu such as Horace and Propertius, writing in the Hellenistic tradition of Callimachus, Aratus, Theocritus and others (but not Apollonius, who wrote a new kind of epic). Vergil flaunted the anti-epic gesture in the Sixth Eclogue (wittily parodied by Ovid in the next generation at the beginning of the Amores).
Vergil’s decision to write an epic–apparently announced in his ultra-Hellenistic Georgics–must have been surprising, and even dismaying, to his contemporaries. But encomiastic poetry was very much a part of the Hellenistic tradition. The Aeneid is encomiastic–the whole poem points to Augustus and Augustus’ “fascist” Roman order. (No, I don’t think the anachronistic epithet is entirely inappropriate.)
But Vergil, I think, was unable to write a poem that was purely propagandistic. So to my mind we have in the Aeneid a poem that is triumphant and at the same time full of ambiguities and, like everything else Vergil wrote, infused with a profound melancholy. The Aeneid ends abruptly (if Vergil intended the poem to end there) as Aeneas scores an ambiguous and bitter triumph–one more dead young man, killed, as he surrenders, by Aeneas in a fit of rage.
If I were Augustus, Vergil is the second-to-last person I would want to write an encomium to myself. Ovid is in first place–I would send him into exile.
Seneca is entirely correct about the ancient biographical literature on Vergil. Most of it is a tissue of naive and even stupid fabrications and inferences from the poetry.
Hylander is in distinguished company. "“ Matthew Arnold..who found in the Aeneid ‘an ineffable melancholy’ and ‘a sweet, a touching sadness’, which Arnold also saw as a testimony to the Aeneid’s incompleteness, a melancholy rooted in ‘the haunting, the irresistible self-dissatisfaction of his heart, when he desired on his death-bed that his poem might be destroyed” (Philip Hardie. “The Last Trojan Hero.”)
#111 miserabile visu: yes, I don’t care for that either. Too me, it reads like a stopgap. But why would Vergil need that with his obvious mastery of metrum and diction?
#109: saxa vocant…Aras: I didn’t mind, till you mentioned it. It seems a bit pedantic, yes. Austin defends it however, saying that Vergil gives "his readers the pleasure of looking at the map with him and identifying the very place where these mythical events occured. "
#119 arma virum: I don’t find it jarring, but intriguing. Why here this obvious echo of the opening lines? Is it irony -see those famous arms lying in the sea-, a melancholy reminder of the fickleness of fate or even -far fetched maybe- a first sign Vergil has second thoughts about the imperial propaganda he is bringing. I have no idea, but it’s very strange.
My apologies for referring so far back. On miserabile visu and mirabile visu (12.252) Austin says that “these are not necessarily stopgaps; they mark a dramatic way of drawing attention to the wonderful or the horrible (especially prodigies; see my note on 2.174” On 2.174 he says mirabile dictu is not just a tag but part of the ritual description of a prodigium. So perhaps what seems to us a tag or “cheap” (presumably through repetition elsewhere) was appreciated differently in antiquity. An unanswerable question of course but it underlines some of the difficulties of the “appreciation” of Virgil.
On 109 I love this kind of footnote within the text. I think it indicates that we are not to get too swept along by the poetry. Rhetoric is used both to accelerate and retard the action. As Austin observes, there is epanalepsis “saxa latentia”…“saxa vocant” which ties the footnote into the text. The distancing (mwh) is part of the self questioning of Virgilian poetics.
119 I love the play on the opening. I think all the points you mention are possible. It shows the multi layered nature of this poem.
124-129 Interea magno misceri murmure pontum… I find an incredible grandeur in the description of the turmoil of the sea which seems to conjure up the very figure of Neptune. I cannot account for why I find these lines overwhelming but I always have.
#Lines 124-129: yes, I agree, I particularly like the effect of:
Et alto
prospiciens, summa placidum caput extulit unda.
There’s something majestic about the god lifting his ‘composed countenance’ above the sea in turmoil.
#miserabile visu. Another related instance is in lines 439-440
infert se saeptus nebula (mirabile dictu)
per medios miscetque viris neque cernitur ulli.
Note how it takes the same place (stopgap-like) in the hexameter as ‘miserabile visu’. I still don’t care for it, but of course you’re right that it’s difficult to tell how Vergil’s contemporaries read this.
The videos by Benjamin Johnson which Timothée has already mentioned are very interesting.
On 109 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4H4CbvXEP0 ) Johnson remarks that it is significant that Virgil tells us that the Italians call the hidden rocks “the Altars” as opposed to the Greek name “the horse’s back” (if Servius is to be trusted). “The Altars” suggests the idea of sacrifice, one of the themes of the Aeneid and a necessary part of the many obstacles faced by Aeneas. Seen in this light the line masquerades as a piece of hellenistic pedantry whilst conveying something of thematic importance.
Generally he seems to have lots of good ideas, which he readily admits are not his own, for example he points out the similarity between 1.92-3 and 12.951-2. Some of it may be a bit basic but he never seems patronising.
Meh, I wouldn’t call it storming ahead. I read 50-60 lines a day and I spend an almost equal amount of time rereading. The syntax is quite managable, it’s mostly the vocabulary that’s slowing me down (reading Caeser and Cicero was not a good preperation in that respect) and getting used to the poetic diction and the rather extreme hyperbaton. Homer is a beginner compared to Vergil when it comes to scrambling words into an unexpected order.
I hope to finish book I this week and after reading through it one last time (reading it again and again is a real treat I find) I’ll push on to book II, supposedly the most famous of them all.
I, too, vote for Aeneidos liber II. Infandum regina iubes renouare dolorem. 'Nuff said. Interesting, by the way, that Greek genetive is used for the word Aeneis.
But in A.II we obviously have Λᾱοκόων, wooden horse and quivering spear. What else can one want?
I must give the practically perfect Finnish translation of the aforementioned verse (by none other than Eino Leino), in perfect dactylic hexameter:
Vaadit virkkamahan mua vaivaa virkkamatonta.
Oh, and of course quicquid id est timeo Danaos et dona ferentis, too.