Virgil’S Aeneid in Modern Verse

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© 2014 Howard Felperin. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 12/27/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-7819-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-8036-4 (e)

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Coming of Age with the Aeneid: A Translator’s Retrospect

Book I: Landfall in Libya

Book II: The Fall of Troy

Book III: The Wanderings of Aeneas

Book IV: Dido in Distress

Book V: The Games

Book VI: To Hell and Back

Book VII: Welcome to Latium

Book VIII. Aeneas in ‘Arcadia’

Book IX: The Dogs of War

Book X: Aeneas Returns

Book XI: Beginning of the End

Book XII: Arms and the Men

Acknowledgements

Cover: Detail of musician from the Etruscan ‘Tomb of the Leopards’ at Tarquinia, north of Rome, 6th century BC. Courtesy of The Art Archive/Collection Dagli Orti/Ref. AA326668.

Frontispiece: Mosaic of Virgil with Clio and Melpomene, muses of history and tragedy, composing the Aeneid. From a Roman villa at Hadrumetum, south of Carthage (Sousse in modern Tunisia). Courtesy of CORBIS/Ref. BEO4O533.

Coming of Age with the Aeneid:

A Translator’s Retrospect

I. Virgil and Me

‘With Virgil,’ as C.S. Lewis owlishly observed, ‘European poetry grows up.’ Aeneas is ‘a man;’ his Homeric prototypes, Achilles and Odysseus, little more than passionate or adventurous ‘boys.’ It couldn’t be better put. Except to add that Aeneas is ‘a man’ in more than the sense of a ‘hero’ or ‘he-man,’ the vir Virgil announces as his epic subject (arma virumque cano). He’s more what we might call ‘a real man.’ And it’s not just European ‘poetry,’ or even ‘literature’ (including the novel, yet to be invented), that will ‘grow up’ with Virgil. A vast, privileged readership will also grow up with him across many nations and generations, and in many senses of that pregnant phrase. I’m one of them. I came of age with the Aeneid, and did so more than once. First as a boy when, over sixty years ago, Virgil took my literary virginity by sheer serendipity. I then had the great good luck to lose it to him again, not once or even twice, but three times: at university, where I first read the Aeneid properly and in Latin; again when I taught it to undergraduates in English; and most recently in retirement, when I brought this version of it to completion in my seventy-third year.

I can only hope that others will be so lucky—surely the underlying motive of anyone foolhardy enough to attempt translating the poem in the first place, let alone an amateur classicist with small Latin and less Greek. Perhaps it’s a forlorn hope. The omens are doubtful at best in a technocratic commercial culture in which the meaning of ‘literacy’ is rapidly changing; to many of my generation, beyond recognition. The least (and most) I can do to help new readers is to preview some of the ‘issues’ they’re likely to face, at least those I recall facing in my own first encounter with the poem. After all, this epic is more than two thousand years old, the product of a radically different culture, and reproduced many times since in others no less different and diverse. All this cultural re-processing has insured a standing in the history of literature nothing less than colossal. For most of that time, the Aeneid was rated, right across Europe, among the greatest poems ever written and the archetypal ‘classic.’ That too is now a problem. Precisely because of its monumental standing, it’s acquired—as classics do—a remote, chilly, semi-sacred aura, bound to put off all but the most undauntable of readers.

My own first encounter certainly put me off, though not for that reason. There were others. I was about nine or ten at the time, a pupil in a good but unexceptional public school (in the American, not the then British, sense of ‘public’). It was the early fifties, a time when children could still read. There were hours in the school-week dedicated to ‘Library,’ when we were freed from classroom routine to discover for ourselves whatever might take our fancies. I’d already read my way through a certain ‘Homer,’ his Iliad and Odyssey, in abridged children’s versions in English prose of course. Boy, were they great! That day, I was searching the shelves for another ‘Homer,’ a ‘sequel’ or ‘prequel’ (as we might now say) to the exploits I’d so enjoyed of Achilles and Odysseus, another story steeped in the myth, magic, and machismo that make Homer so appealing to boys of all ages. Please, let there be one more Homer; better still, many! At that point, I had no idea that those two ‘stories’ were all he wrote; still less that ‘he’ wasn’t one man, or that ‘he’ didn’t actually ‘write’ them. I’d discover such things later.

But I did turn up something promising: a ‘story’ called the Aeneid by a certain ‘Virgil.’ It too was abridged for children, and not exactly Greek, but Roman. Yet in its way it seemed to fit the bill, although ‘its way’ soon led to disappointment. It was a lot like ‘Homer’ but clearly wasn’t ‘Homer.’ Take its hero. Although Aeneas does much the same sort of thing as Achilles and Odysseus—albeit in reverse order—he isn’t really like them at all. He’s heroic all right, having played, so we’re told, a big part in the Trojan War, though on the other side; he even fights, like Achilles, a war of its own. And like Odysseus, he’s caught up in the diaspora following the fall of Troy, with lots of adventures along the way. He even visits some of the same strange places. Yet I could barely recall him from the Iliad. Oh yes, wasn’t he the one bested by Diomedes in Book V and rescued by his mother, Aphrodite (now named Venus), who suffers a flesh-wound in the process and oozes ‘ichor,’ the divine equivalent of blood! I did enjoy his account of the fall of Troy in Book II—this is more like it, I thought!—fuller than the brief version in the Odyssey, and much more vivid when told from the reverse angle. I also loved his tragic affair with Dido in Book IV, but thought him a bit of a jerk to leave her in the lurch. I’m afraid Virgil began to lose me when he sends Aeneas off to found his ‘new’ Troy in Italy—the whole second half of the poem!—what would eventually become Rome, the capital of the world.

This had to be my biggest stumbling-block, bigger even than its over-dependence on Homer: its wholesale commitment to Rome and its future empire. For modern Italy was then suffering the aftermath of a war of its own, one in which it had been on the wrong, i.e. the losing, side. Il Duce, with his own African adventure, and Der Fuehrer, with imperial designs grander still, had given empire a much worse name than it formerly had, which wasn’t altogether good. Successive Italian governments were falling like houses of cards, constitutions being re-written every few months, and the nation suffering, as I recall, the almost unimaginable indignity of having its application for full U.N. membership rejected in an unusual variation on the Groucho Marx principle! Its films at the time (I vividly recall La Strada and Bitter Rice), though outstanding in quality, reflected profound social alienation and grinding poverty, the golden age of Fellini and Antonioni yet to come. Italian writers—my father was reading Alberto Moravia and Ignazio Silone—were dissecting, with relentless realism, the rise of fascism. The state of contemporary Italy, even to a boy only vaguely attuned to such things, did not encourage him to take too seriously the grandeur of Rome in Italy’s ancient national epic. For that’s what the poem was, is, and always would be, from the moment it was first written (though never quite completed) more than two millennia ago.

In the fifties, it was the glory that was Greece rather than the grandeur that was Rome that captivated the imagination of the West. Recently liberated from Nazi occupation, Greece could hold its head high under a halo of freedom, democracy, and civilization going back to its repulse of Persia in the early fifth century BC. And did Greece go back! Hadn’t Michael Ventris just deciphered the cryptic ancient script called ‘Linear B,’ which turned out to be very early Greek? Greece also meant ‘myth.’ While my father grappled studiously with the austerities of Moravia and Silone, my mother was enjoying Mary Renault’s novelisations of Greek myth, The Bull from the Sea and The King Must Die. This was the heyday of comparative mythology, and something called ‘myth criticism’ was in the air. Robert Graves’ The White Goddess and Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces enjoyed near cult-status at the time. The ‘divine mythology of Greece,’ as Keats long ago styled it, was in the flush of a revival. Myth had even found its way into films: Never on Sunday, Boy on a Dolphin, Sundays and Cybele. Their settings might be modern, urban, not even Greek, but they conjured up a magical world redolent of ancient myth. Poor Italy hadn’t experienced any such renaissance, and its epic poem and poet suffered in consequence, at least in my boyish mind.

There was something else at the back of that mind that didn’t help, and it too had to do with post-war ‘Rome,’ though not in its secular dimension. The word ‘piety’ (pietas), which pops up on the first page of the Aeneid, and repeatedly thereafter in the form of pius, Virgil’s preferred sobriquet for his hero, didn’t bode well. Wasn’t the then Pope named ‘Pius XII’? How could a hero of the ancient world be the namesake of a Pope? Greco-Roman religion posed no problem. That was polytheism: poetic, playful, preeminently pagan. It was hard to tell whether Homer himself took it seriously. But Virgil? His preoccupation with ‘piety’ seemed suspiciously religious to me and, thanks to the Pope’s name, Roman Catholic to boot, which made it worse. Wasn’t Latin the lynchpin of their ritual and the mainstay of their schools? Hadn’t this very Pope—this same Pius XII—turned a blind eye to the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy before and during the war? Wasn’t the Catholic Church historically culpable, even in better times, for perpetuating anti-Semitism? And religion, in all its forms, ‘the opium of the people’? It’s what my father used to say, an English socialist and a Jew, when I learned this catechism at his knee.

In reading any text—a ‘classic’ text especially—a sense of context is important, not only to getting it right, but to getting it at all. That means its context of reception as well as production. My early dismay over the Aeneid had more to do with the latter than the former. After all, Homer’s epics, which I loved, were not two but three thousand years old, give or take; yet their historical distance seemed to pose no problem at all, and their narratives were no less exotic and extravagant than that of Virgil—maybe more. Nor was it a matter of language or translation, as far as I could tell. Homer’s Greek was even further beyond my grasp than Virgil’s Latin, but the translations I’d read, whoever had done them, seemed at the time to present no real difficulty in either case. What interfered with my reading of Virgil’s great poem arose from cultural, not linguistic, differences, and from my side of the great divide between it and me.

When I first looked into I-don’t-know-whose Virgil as a boy of ten, I didn’t like it. The problem, I now know, was mine; I’d got it wrong. The Aeneid isn’t, as I thought it was, a pale imitation of Homer. Nor is empire, its Roman incarnation in particular, a necessarily evil thing, not even for those living under its far-reaching thumb. As for the Catholic Church, maybe it’s not the instrument of the devil after all, though it does have a lot—quite a lot—to answer for; but the proposition is at least debatable. After all, some of my best friends are Catholic, and my first teachers of Latin, and later Greek, were products of its schools. Both were good men! So I now reckon that the Church can’t be all bad. Even out of evil, good can spring. Isn’t that one of their teachings, the doctrine of ‘felix culpa,’ the ‘fortunate fall’ on which Paradise Lost, a poem I admire, hinges? Clearly it’s time, after a career spent teaching literature, to reconsider all those boyhood misconceptions of mine.

II. Virgil and Homer

Between Homer and me it was love at first sight. As it was between Homer and just about everyone who’s ever read him. Keats famously likened his first glimpse into Homer to the discovery of a new planet or a vast ocean—that, despite the formidable efforts of George Chapman, his Elizabethan translator, to obscure Keats’ view. Homer offers anyone who opens him an all but transparent window on the world he frames, and seems to cut exactly at the joints. Not even Shakespeare has proved so unfussily democratic in his appeal, or been more widely celebrated in consequence. And so it’s been from the beginning. When Aristotle, in fourth-century BC Athens, formulated his Poetics, a guide to the best ways to tell a story, it was Homer, even more than Sophocles, who served as his main model of how to do it. And Homer had done it twice, both very good stories. By the seventeenth century, his impending romantic apotheosis was already shining forth from Rembrandt’s ‘Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer,’ where the latter’s marble head irradiates Aristotle’s face (which looks uncannily like Rembrandt’s) and bathes his somber northern study in a golden glow.

No less fanciful is that passage in Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’ (1711) which imagines the youthful Virgil planning his Roman epic and consulting his Homer for guidance:

When first young Maro in his boundless mind

A work to outlast immortal Rome designed,

Perhaps he seemed above the critic’s law,

And but from Nature’s fountains scorned to draw.

But when to examine every part he came,

Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.

Convinced, amazed, he checks the bold design,

And rules as strict his laboured work confine,

As if the Stagirite o’erlooked each line. (Essay on Criticism, ll. 130-38)

‘Maro’ is Virgil’s family name and ‘the Stagirite,’ Aristotle, whose ‘critic’s law,’ exemplified by Homer, turns out to be identical with ‘nature.’ That’s a tricky term, what we might now call ‘life’ or ‘experience’ or ‘reality,’ perhaps even ‘the human condition’ in its deep, recurrent, and universal contours that great literature—Homer certainly—is supposed to ‘imitate.’ I prefer ‘represent’ or even ‘mediate.’

Pope makes it sound so wonderfully simple: all Virgil need do to create his deathless masterpiece is follow the precedent of his deathless master and. the neoclassical ‘laws’ of composition that flow from him. These, in a nutshell, are the ‘unities’: (1) of action; stick to one main story, and make it work efficiently by starting, not at the beginning, but in the middle; better still, near the end; then fill in your audience by flash—back before bringing it to its conclusion; (2) of time and place, so as not to strain credulity by stretching it over too much time or territory; and (3) of character—this is implicit in Aristotle and Homer—by making your protagonist—not too many, please—clearly and consistently motivated. None of the above are quite ‘laws,’ and practices have since been tried that Aristotle never considered, not all of them bad. But those he recommends are basic; they go to the willing suspension of disbelief and the unwritten contract betweenauthor and audience on which it depends: the agreed contrivances and accepted impossibilities—think of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, unlocalized stage, pentameter blank verse—that enable any story in any age tobe shared in the first place. Call them ‘conventions.’ By the time Virgil began his epic near the turn of the first millenium, those of Homer were so naturalized as to seem natural: ‘nature still, but nature methodized,’ as Pope puts it. So Virgil need only follow Homer’s example, and Bob’s (or Homer’s) your uncle: another deathless masterpiece.

Can that be right? To write your own epic, you imitate someone else’s? That has to be a contradiction. It’s what I, as a boy of ten, thought Virgil had done, and I didn’t like it. I now know it’s not what he’d done. There’s more to making deathless masterpieces than imitating deathless masters, at least in the modern world. And Virgil, unlike Homer, is a poet of the modern world, even in a sense, the poet of the modern world. Not modernist in Ezra Pound’s way of seeking some revolutionary ‘originality’ through noisy movements defined by tendentious ‘isms’—fashion and politics are never far away from modernity—but in that of such ‘early modern’ poets as Shakespeare and Milton, reading through the multiple sources newly available to them to produce works for their own times. Writing, through its novel power to fix and objectify the flux of existence, expands the reach of art, widens its horizons, and makes possible that elusive thing, itself ever fleeting, we call ‘modernity.’ Printing, even more. The only poet who imitated ‘nature’ by imitating the master who instantiated it was Homer himself, who never exactly existed. ‘Homer’ is a cultural composite, the collective name given to many poets who sang their songs over many centuries within an oral tradition. C.S. Lewis terms it ‘primary,’ as opposed to ‘secondary,’ epic; but the distinction goes further back to the early romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel, who contrasted, in a famous essay, the ‘naïve’ or ‘simple’ with the ‘sentimental’ or ‘sophisticated’ poet, who comes later. The former, he wrote, ‘is nature;’ the latter ‘seeks nature.’

‘Homer’ is the type of Schlegel’s ‘naïve’ poet, the aoidos or ‘bard’ of oral tradition, singer of songs and teller of tales, a bit like Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Last Minstrel,’ only earlier and Greek. These ‘dawn poets,’ illiterate but hardly mute or inglorious, flourished from before the Trojan War (c.1250BC), which became one of their subjects, until the Greeks remembered, in the eighth century BC, how to write in the script now known as ancient Greek. That’s more than half a millenium. Like all ancient artisans, they learned their craft (‘poet’ in Greek means ‘maker’) from a master (as the Cyclopses learn metal-craft from Vulcan, and Pallas, war-craft from Aeneas) before becoming masters themselves and performing their repertoire to the lyre in the halls of great lords. Their material must have been ‘modular’ in format and subject to improvisation to make it adaptable to time and occasion. When writing came into use, their songs and tales were written down and collected as the earliest Greek poetry extant: ‘Homer,’ ‘Hesiod,’ and the ‘Epic Cycle.’ We know how it was performed from Book VIII of the Odyssey, where the blind bard Demodokos sings of a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus, who is present at Alcinous’ feast. Similarly, at Dido’s reception in Book I of the Aeneid, the bard Iopas, who studied with Atlas and wears his hair ‘long’ (presumably in honour of Apollo), recites his songs on the nature and origin of things. Demodokos is clearly Homer’s alter-ego within his poem; Iopas, not quite Virgil’s.

When a newer medium displaces an older, it doesn’t dispense altogether with residual conventions but co-opts those it can to new purposes. Many an early film, for example, begins with a hand opening the pages of the book on which it’s based as a way of legitimating itself and reassuring its viewers, before dissolving into the visual ‘reality’ of the film itself in a kind of ‘through-the-looking-glass effect.’ Later, it takes the form of a shift from black-and-white into new and vivid ‘technicolor’ to mark a transition from past to present or from dreaming to waking. Nowadays, characters are sometimes transported through the screen of the film they are watching within the film into its world. Virgil does similar things. After announcing his twin Homeric themes of ‘arms and the man,’ he no less Homerically invokes the ‘Muse’ (presumably Mnemosyne, patroness of poetry and guardian of collective memory). After all, an epic requires inspiration, especially one as belated as this; it’s not just ‘made up,’ a mere fiction, but stakes a claim to truth, so its poet may well need some help with his memory. Virgil even more than Homer, who had sung of relatively recent events to audiences not all that remote from them, some even descended from the heroes he sang. Homer’s songs were steeped in ‘presence’: the presence of the past, of the audience in the hall before him; of the voice of the bard who present, past, and future sees, a voice ‘underwritten’ as it wereby the authority of those who came before and transmit their own voices through him. Oral tradition is grounded in a ‘myth of presence,’ the myth that speech, because present to itself, is ‘truer’ than writing, and its meanings less ‘equivocal,’ more immediate and authoritative, in consequence.

Poor Virgil is belated and displaced—his action is set more than twelve centuries before he records it—so appealing to the ‘Muse’ lends credence to the uncanny ‘knowledge’ he must display of why and how it all happened, long before he was present to bear first-hand witness to it. How could he know whose spear (or was it his sword?) entered which vital organ (was it his lung or liver?). Let’s just put it down to the ‘Muse,’ who must have whispered it in the poet’s shell-like ear. Virgil invokes more Muses more often and more earnestly than Homer: Erato, before the ‘catalogue of troops’ marching to the Latin war in Book VII; Calliope, before the catalogue of Aeneas’ allies (including Virgil’s own forbears from Etruscan Mantua) on his return in Book IX. He seeks her aid crucially at the start of the second, Iliadic half of the poem, which he tellingly styles ‘the greater work’ (maius opus), presumably because it’s the Italian story, the founding myth of Rome and his poem’s raison d’etre, the new, the real, story he has to tell. To do it, he’ll need all the help he can get from this archaic device, precisely because his poem is so modern and literary (‘laboured’ was Pope’s word for it), its subject-matter that much less present than Homer’s to folk memory. Because the Aeneid is not a folk poem, its need for the trappings of one is all the greater.

What was young Maro to do? Stick too close to Homer, and he loses touch with the modern reality of Rome; depart from him too drastically—even if he knew how to do it—and he could lose his readership and critical approval (now an issue). Right away, potential differences are opening between Virgil’s epic and its Homeric models. As the world changes, the conventions designed to mediate it come under stress and give way to new ones. As a greater neoclassical critic than Pope puts it, ‘There is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.’ Samuel Johnson was defending Shakespeare against the charge of violating the unities in Antony and Cleopatra. Which he does. But the historical ‘nature’ of the action—its scale and span—and his own stage conventions permit him to do so. Virgil too opens an appeal from Homeric convention to a world changed utterly from that represented by Homer. He does so to achieve new room to maneuver, the license needed to tell a very different story. In his dealings with Homer, Virgil becomes the paradigm-case of inter-poetic relations in the modern era; he illustrates the full range of possible uses to which poets will now put their predecessors, everything from plagiarism to homage to parody.

Take the convention of beginning in the midst of things and flashing back, as Homer does in Book IX of the Odyssey, where the hero becomes his own bard and recounts his trials and tribulations over four books to king Alcinous and his guests. From here, his journey home will be straightforward, and his dramatic reunions with dog, nurse, son, and wife—not to mention his ingenious and thrilling destruction of those odious suitors—can take center stage in the narrative present and occupy the whole second half of the epic. The Stagyrite would approve. Not surprisingly, Virgil takes over the techniques of flashback and first person narration early in the Aeneid. There’s the pictorial narrative in the temple of Juno in Carthage, where Aeneas sees his own past on display—a ‘through-the-looking-glass’ moment if ever there was one, perhaps the first in western literature. It puts the Homeric past literally into perspective and establishes the hero’s prestige in the present, into which his reverie then dissolves on the arrival of Dido. Then there’s Iopas’ performance—so far, so Homeric (or Hesiodic). But it too turns into another through-the-looking glass moment, when it gives way to Aeneas’ first-person account of the fall of Troy and his subsequent wanderings in the next two books.

There’s more at play here than technical virtuosity. Odysseus’ flashback, though efficient, was little more than a travelogue of previous adventures. That of Aeneas does much more work, revealing not least why Dido falls in love with him in the first place. ‘His look, his voice’ (vultus verbaque), as well as his manliness and nobility, enter her heart. His account also establishes what might be called the co-ordinates of his ‘character’ (in both senses)—the past and future with which neither Homeric hero is generously endowed. (Few books have been written on their boyhoods.) Their pasts provide the odd plot-device—Odysseus’ famous scar, Achilles’ more famous heel—but not indices of character. Nor do their pasts and futures bear on their present. If and when they do get home, they’ll carry on much as before—the premise of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses.’ Nor are they defined by their social relations either. Odysseus has a wife and son, a father, dog, and nurse, and an old mentor named ‘Mentor;’ but his dealings with them on his return are almost formal. They seem to care more for him than he for them. Achilles’ one ‘significant other’ is Patroklos, his lover and soul-mate. His old tutor, Phoinix, who thinks he knows him, predicts he’ll relent when he’s properly appeased, but he’s wrong and he doesn’t. It’s hard to say whether he feels anything for Briseis, the pretext for his rage at Agamemnon, except as a trophy of war and badge of honour. Homer’s heroes, like boys, live in the splendid isolation of an eternal present—precisely what is not permitted Aeneas. See what happens when he tries to do just that with Dido!

Aeneas is the creature of his Trojan past, figured perfectly in the father he loads on his back at the fall of Troy, and the creator of the Roman future embodied in his son Ascanius or ‘Iulus,’ the namesake of a famous Roman. Triangulating his identity too are his socii, his ‘shipmates’ or ‘countrymen’ or ‘men’ (decidedly not ‘comrades’), the Aeneadae (literally, his ‘children’ or ‘sons’), to whose leadership he’s born as a Trojan prince, but also learns, earns, and grows into, requiring a most un-Homeric repression of personal desire and the frequent dissembling of doubts and fears—not just tactically, for the mission’s sake, Odysseus-style—but to lighten their load. He weeps for the hapless Palinurus on discovering he’s missing—does Odysseus, or even the highly civilized Hector, ever shed tears for his dead?—and spends a lot of time burying them properly. For him, the quintessentially Virgilian ‘tears of things’ (lacrimae rerum), shed or suppressed, are never far away. Unlike his prototypes, Aeneas is an integrated personality who honours his deepest bonds and obligations. There’s only one word for it in Latin, the epic sobriquet that resonates not only through the poem but throughout literary history: pius. It’s a word fraught with difficulties for modern readers; more so for translators. I’ll need several words for it. Why, I’ll explain later.

As my worries over pietas fall away—the concept turns out not to be exclusively religious—this might be the point to revisit the larger prejudice it once aroused in me, the one against religion in general. What about those gods of his? As in Homer, Virgil’s divine superplot frames and explains, furthers and frustrates, the human action below. Both Olympian theocracies are fully anthropomorphic, displaying their all too human traits on a superhuman scale, foibles much more than strengths. But in Virgil especially, the gods carry a comic potential ever ready to collapse into farce. ‘Do heavenly hearts,’ the poet asks at the outset, ‘hold so much animus?’ Surely the most rhetorical question in literature! Juno’s interactions with men and gods alike are as farcical as they are fateful. Her ceaseless machinations display a vanity, a petulance, a bitchiness that verge on pantomime, and she’s not alone. Their powers—including Jove’s—are limited by ‘fate;’ yet most of the gods flaunt to the full the arrogance of their immortality and the recklessness of their impunity. Look at the way Juno manipulates Aeolus and Iris, Allecto, Amata, and Juturna; or Venus her son Cupid, to do their bidding and perform their mischief. Or how poor Palinurus, clutching his tiller to the end, is dispatched by Somnus, god of sleep. So gratuitously, it’s hard to say why. Is he too working for a higher god? If so, which one? Juno again? Or is it Neptune this time, who’s already stated his requirement of one life in sacrifice—only one!—for Aeneas’ safe passage. Or does Somnus toss the hapless helmsman overboard just for the fun of it, or simply because he can?

Don’t worry, I’m not arguing that Virgil is an atheist merely because he sends up the gods, though you do wonder how anyone could credit deities like these. But he certainly puts their status into question, if not into doubt. Let’s say ‘into brackets.’ Do his gods have an objective existence or are they projections of human subjectivity? Does Somnus actually persecute Palinurus or does a weary Palinurus simply doze off and fall overboard? Are we to read the whole wonderful episode as an extended metaphor? Is Venus’entrapment of Dido through her son ‘Love’ in Book I to be read in the same way? Mezentius, we’re told more than once, is an atheist (contemptor deum), at least a blasphemer—he calls his right arm his god—as well as a cruel tyrant. Yet Virgil goes out of his way to dramatize his devotion to his son, Lausus, and to his horse, Rhoebus; and when he’s killed at the end of Book X, he dies nobly; not by