Another suggestion for bilingual readers comes from Benjamin Johnson which I am sure I have read elsewhere.
line 37-38
haec secum: mene incepto desistere victam
nec posse Italia Teucrorum avertere regem?
The elision in mene incepto pronounced something like menincepto is reminiscent of Achilles’ rage ( μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος). So there is a relationship between μῆνιν and furor.
The loose ends
-#434, the bee simile:
Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura
exercet sub sole labor, cum gentis adultos
educunt fetus, aut cum liquentia mella
stipant et dulci distendunt nectare cellas,
aut onera accipiunt venientum, aut agmine facto
ignavom fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent:
What is meant with the ‘onera venientum’? Are the venientum the new bees (the ‘new’comers)?
-the expression jungere dextras is used twice, see for example 408: cur dextrae jungere dextram non datur….
Can this simply be translated as ‘a handshake’?
-#715-719:
Ille ubi complexu Aeneae colloque pependit
et magnum falsi implevit genitoris amorem,
reginam petit haec oculis, haec pectore toto
haeret et interdum gremio fovet, inscia Dido,
insidat quantus miserae deus
according to Austin ‘miserae’ here means ‘to her sorrow’ → how a great god settles there to her sorrow. Couldn’t it refer to Dido instead? → how a great god settles on (her) unfortunate woman.
-Venus ordering Amor to take Ascanius’ place: just like in Homer the gods provide for an additional reason for action where a purely human motivation, also apparent from the text, would do. For it is clear that Aeneas and Dido are impressed by eachother at first sight. So, what does this episode add? Is it to exculpate Dido for anything that follows and make her even more pitiable?
Venus does not come off well here, striking down on Dido in her happiness at the very moment she shows genuine friendliness to Aeneas and the Trojans. And Amor deceiving even Aeneas is creepy and even slightly revolting. The whole scene is just utterly ruthless. The gods as realpolitiker?
aut onera accipiunt venientum – at the entrance to the hive, the beers working in the hive take up the food brought back by those who have been out foraging.
-the expression jungere dextras is used twice, see for example 408: cur dextrae jungere dextram non datur….
Can this simply be translated as ‘a handshake’?
That’s the idea.
Mynors punctuates:
Ille ubi complexu Aeneae colloque pependit
et magnum falsi implevit genitoris amorem,
reginam petit. haec oculis, haec pectore toto
haeret et interdum gremio fovet inscia Dido
insidat quantus miserae deus.
In any case, insidat quantus miserae deus is an indirect question depending on inscia, and miserae does refer to Dido. Austin’s translation is not exactly “literal”, but not incorrect. Dido is not miserable at the moment, but she will be as a result of the god’s deception.
There is a double meaning in insidat: both “settles on her” and a suggestion of “ambushes” or “sets a trap”, based on the cognate insidiae.
In Vergil’s version, I’m not sure you can say that the gods aren’t necessary–Venus (and Amor) play an active role in deceiving Dido. On the other hand, Dido is also a victim of self-deception, and it’s impossible to disentangle Venus’s deception from Dido’s. There’s a long history, starting in antiquity (e.g., Augustine) and continuing down to the present, of controversy over whether Dido is portrayed sympathetically and humanely as a victim of deception by Venus and abandonment by Aeneas–a more or less innocent victim over whom Fate rides roughshod on the way to the founding of Rome–or whether she represents, less sympathetically, an “oriental” (as opposed to Roman rectitude and sense of duty) and a woman (with all the misogynistic baggage of antiquity), lacking self-control and a slave to her passions, attempting to subvert the teleology of Augustan Rome, at the same time representing the Carthage of Roman history (in Rome’s eyes) and prefiguring, in more recent Roman history, Cleopatra. Of course, these interpretations aren’t necessarily mutually inconsistent.
Congratulations on finishing the first book Bart! It does gain more depth with rereading, doesn’t it? (Unlike Homer?)
Venus ordering Amor to take Ascanius’ place: just like in Homer the gods provide for an additional reason for action where a purely human motivation, also apparent from the text, would do. For it is clear that Aeneas and Dido are impressed by eachother at first sight. So, what does this episode add? Is it to exculpate Dido for anything that follows and make her even more pitiable?
No it doesn’t exculpate her, any more than it would in Homer, though we may question whether falling in love stands in need of exculpation. But it surely does make her more pitiable. Any victim of Eros is pitiable, and Dido more than most. She cannot know how big a god this little boy is that she’s so fervently embracing. miserae (“proleptic”) describes her resultant condition. Infelix Dido is what she has now become, but she does not know it: inscia Dido—how telling these epithets are. Vergil impresses on us that this will not come out happily for her. (He’s good at dramatic irony—when it suits: he doesn’t encourage us to wonder how it will come out for Aeneas.) She showed Aeneas pity but receives none herself. You’d have to be inhuman not to pity her, the way things turn out. — Still, as fated-to-be-Roman Aeneas might point out (but not coldly, never coldly), you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
I think it’s a great scene, and an essential one.
Venus does not come off well here, striking down on Dido in her happiness at the very moment she shows genuine friendliness to Aeneas and the Trojans. And Amor deceiving even Aeneas is creepy and even slightly revolting. The whole scene is just utterly ruthless. The gods as realpolitiker?
Eros/Amor, as Aphodite’s agent, is by tradition (as in life) a conscienceless mischief-maker, and Vergil makes the most of it. Venus is not quite so simple. Vergil has to reconcile—or juggle without reconciling—her two roles, both mythologically built-in: she is the love-goddess (and acts as such with Dido here), and she is Aeneas’ mother. This is one of the places where they don’t fit together too well, it seems to me (and best not to think of Aeneas and Cupid as siblings). As goddess of love she does not care about consequences, as Aeneas’ protecting goddess she should be facilitating his mission not hampering it. There was actually a thread about this tension: http://discourse.textkit.com/t/venus-in-the-aeneid/13333/1
This Dido-Aeneas scene is modelled on Medea-Jason in bk.3 of Apollonius’ Argonautica, where Aphrodite sends Eros to shoot his love-arrows at Medea to fire her with passion for Jason. You can’t have a woman falling in love without Cupid!
[Dido and Aeneas are jointly deceived in mistaking Cupid for Ascanius (but we’re accustomed to gods impersonating mortals), but otherwise I don’t see deception in evidence, on anyone’s part. —Unless you count Aeneas’ mirabile-dictu cloak of invisibility and his beautification on reappearance to view. Now that’s an awkward contrivance.]
Bill, Michael, thanks.
Reading Vergil is a completely different experience than reading Homer. Homer is direct, explicit, visual. All clichés, I know, but true nevertheless. Vergil is more equivocal, auditive, polished to perfection. The interplay between word order, rythm and sound make for a much more esthetic experience. You could listen to him being read aloud without knowing Latin and still get a hunch of this. In fact my 5-year old son likes to to do just that when I’m reading the Aeneid to myself (as long as his 1 minute attention span allows for). “Speaking music” he calls it (bright kid 
)
For Homer it’s the text that matters, for Vergil the words.
Apologies again for not being as fast as bart and maybe everyone has moved on but I have been puzzling over this line:
…quibus omnis ab alto 160
frangitur inque sinus scindit sese unda reductos
Although the general sense is clear I did struggle with why unda was almost at the end of the sentence and is placed so closely to reductos which belongs with sinus. At first I thought that the postponed unda which belongs with omnis interrupts sinus reductos in much the same way as incoming waves interrupt returning waves. But I see that lewis and Short gives a meaning of produce for reduco, so that the waves produce “folds” or perhaps “ripples” as Goold has it. Its more a case of dividing waves rather than reflecting them back.
On the meaning of sinus:
Goold translates “on which every every wave from the main is broken, then parts into receding ripples.”
Yet in georgics iv 419- he translates …quo plurima vento,/cogitur inque sinus scindit sese unda reductos as …“whither many a wave is driven by the wind, then separates into receding inlets,” .
There is no reason why the two passages have to be translated the same but I wonder why there is a difference. Reading the next sentence of the Georgics didnt seem to make his choice any clearer. Perhaps both passages can be read in either way. Austin certainly talks about filling “the deep inlets of the coast.”
Perhaps this thread could be left open for Book 1?
Reading Vergil is a completely different experience than reading Homer. Homer is direct, explicit, visual.
I agree that there are great differences between Homer and Virgil. I think one should not ignore the obvious difference in composition technique, that Homer has its origin in oral poetry and Virgil’s poetry is evidently composed through writing. Moreover without getting into the old Homeric arguments of single or multiple authorship we can at least be sure that the Aeneid is by a single hand.
I find all the things you say about word order and rhythm and sound apply just as well to Homer. But this is no doubt a matter of taste. I find the experience of both Homer and Virgil exhilarating and wouldn’t want to rank them in order.
How fortunate your son is that he has a father who reads Virgil to him!
I have trouble with this too. For several years I’ve been moving through texts, thirty to fifty lines each day, without striving for mastery of the day’s text, but being satisfied with finding an acceptable literal meaning and untangling some difficult grammatical problems. I learned to read English by reading a lot of stuff superficially, and then later learning how read more slowly, more analytically, when a text seemed to require this treatment (for example, difficult moderns like Proust and Faulkner).
I do metrical reading now-and-then, rather than constantly. A problem here is that recorded instances of metrical reading of Latin verse are not pleasing to me, something that has set me to thinking.
I now believe that enjoying sound in verse is learned socially, in groups, just as one learns singing and dancing in company with other persons–even though I’d be happy to learn that I’m wrong about this. Since my Latin study is solitary, and because I’m already 77, I do not count on learning the pleasures of Latin verse.
I might compare this with marching. It’s hard to believe that one might learn to enjoy marching as a solitary exercise, without the companionship of others, without the solid TRAMP, tramp, TRAMP, tramp, and without the mystical feeling of being part of a big unity, moving forward in power.
But the satisfaction of picking apart a puzzle, and turning it into something comprehensible, is enough for me.
I think that if you internalize the hexameter (and Horace’s meters) you should be able to get a lot more enjoyment and satisfaction out of Latin poetry. You need to be able to read metrically constantly, not just now and then. The meter is about 1/3 of the pleasure of Latin verse, and it’s inextricably intertwined with the substance of the verse.
And it isn’t hard to train yourself to read metrically without working out the scansion of each line in advance. Just work on it for a while.
The most important skill isn’t so much getting the longs and shorts–though you have to do that–but getting a feel for the caesuras. Once you get a feel for the caesuras, everything will fall into place, and you’ll be able to enjoy the poetry instead of decoding the meaning.
Oh, but I wouldn’t want to rank them either. I was knocked off my feet by both the Iliad and the Odyssey. But Vergil strikes me as utterly untranslatable in a way that Homer doesn’t. On the assumption you agree on this -you very well might not of course-, why should this be the case? I think it’s for the reasons I gave in the post you responded to. Vergil’s genius is in his style, Homer’s in his story. Or so it seems to me after 900 lines into the Aeneid.
“Vergil strikes me as utterly untranslatable in a way that Homer doesn’t.” Agree.
“Vergil’s genius is in his style, Homer’s in his story.” Disagree.
It is easier to translate Homer as you read it and give some sense to it. Its harder to do that with Virgil because he uses so many untranslatable rhetorical effects. To produce a good translation of either I would have thought was equally difficult. I admire Dryden’s Virgil very much. On bbc radio 4 recently Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book VI was read by Ian McKellen. I was very impressed.
I am with Hylander on genius and style.
Okay, but whence then the untranslatability of Vergil?
Mwh remarked somewhere in this thread -I can’t find it back now- that Homer should be read quite fast while Vergil requires a slower reading pace. I agree and think this is for the same reason.
I suppose your question is not directly aimed at me as I dont agree with your first proposition.
Nevertheless, I also dont agree with mwh’s statement about reading Homer fast. Both Virgil and Homer have to be read at a speed where one can fully enjoy the sound and the metre. Some passages in either author might move more speedily because of the rapid narrative. I dont think it makes sense to generalise.
As i have said before the big difference for me between the two poems is that Homer is evidently an oral poet and Virgil is written.
I dont think Virgil is untranslatable tout court. All poetry is difficult to translate. Isnt that why we learn Latin and Greek to read it in the original?
Remember 1.174 Ac primum silici scintillam excudit Achates? Last month I said I was inclined to take silici as ablative, not dative, and after some discussion I said I’d consult Horsfall on 7.668 capiti next time I was in the library. I’ve now done so, and can report he takes that as dative (which I welcome), explicitly rejecting ablative, for which however he cites “Cat.68.124, Tib.1.1.72, NW 1, 366” (I don’t know what NW is, unless a misprint for NH, the Nisbet-Hubbard Horace comms.). So I turn to Fordyce on the Catullus, and he says the abl. in –i is “not uncommon in Lucretius, and later poets sometimes find [it] convenient,” instancing capiti, cineri, lateri, and nemori (which all have the same metrical shape as silici) and citing Vergil and Propertius for the archaizing capiti. By “convenient” I first assumed he meant metrically convenient, but evidently not, since capite would scan equally well in both the Catullus and the Tibullus (I haven’t looked up others).
I still favor ablative here, now more strongly than before. I have little confidence in my Stilgefühl when it comes to Vergil, but I feel dative would be just too odd. Then the question becomes Why silici rather than silice? Sound? Archaic tone? I fancy it may be no more than instinctive discomfort on Vergil’s part with having a short vowel before sc-, a collocation I think Latin poets tend to avoid because of its metrical equivocality.
Sorry this is such a small and esoteric matter.
I don’t think I need to defend what I said (whatever it was) about Homer reading faster than Vergil. Homer, simple and direct, reads fast because the phrasing is repetitive and largely predictable; in at least half the lines you know what the last word will be before you get to it, and rarely do you have to think. Not so with Vergil, where the forms of expression are infinitely more complex, and sound and metre infinitely more important. Every word is telling, every line and every scene crammed with resonance and intertextual subtlety. Do I exaggerate? Perhaps.
Vergil can be read quite fast. (After all, Vergil read parts of the Aeneid to Augustus, we are credibly told—but then Augustus knew Latin, and we don’t). I’ve just read through most of Aen.7 at a fair clip. But I think I’d have done better not to.
And as to translating them: to translate either one is to wreck it, but the wreckage is worse with Vergil. Far far better to read him without translating. We’ll never learn to read Latin if we insist on translating all the time.
Incidentally, going back to ater, Aen.7.456f. has atro / lumine!
Thanks mwh for an interesting post.
I think I might be guilty of interpreting what you had said about Homer a little too literally. What you say makes sense.
Two links, maybe old news for some, but I did not see them mentioned before here.
-the first one to the vergil project: http://vergil.classics.upenn.edu/vergil/index.php/document/index/document_id/1
Lots of information here. I like the option to list all the Homeric correspondenses for a certain passage of the Aeneid
-the second one is an article from 2012 or thereabout http://doc.rero.ch/record/233204/files/CASTELLETTI_2012_MH.pdf claiming Vergil left his signature in the first lines of the Aeneid
Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram;
The writer claims this to be a boustrophedon acrostic: “the first and last letter of each line, reversing the direction of reading (as in a boustrophedon script) read ASTILOMV, which I suggest should be understood as ‘A Stilo M(aronis) V(ergili)’. The word Maronis would be confirmed by iram, the last word in the fourth line, which, read in reverse (that is, in the direction of the acrostic) provides not only the M but also MAR.”
Se non è vero è ben trovato.
Bart Thank you very much for the links. The Virgil project looks like a very helpful resource. I was fascinated by the acrostic paper I can see that some will be sceptical but it made sense to me.
It is fascinating, isn’t it? Most of all perhaps the fact that even after 2000 years new things can be discovered in the very opening lines of one the most read and interpreted texts of literature. All on the assumption that it is true of course.
Yes it is exciting that new (to us) things can be discovered. Rather than true or false perhaps its best to think in terms of convincing or not. At different times in different cultures the balance between these two will change.