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Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?
Jun. 3rd, 2010 02:52 pmThis question comes at the end of the proem to the Aeneid, and Vergil spends the next twelve books of his poem demonstrating that yes, there can be such bitterness in the hearts of gods as to force Aeneas, a man of piety, through all the many trials he endures.
I read the Aeneid during my senior year in high school, and at times it seemed as though Vergil had written it just so the gods could create trials for me—I am not nearly so pious as Aeneas, but reading it was hard! I was the only fool in my school (even among the students in the advanced Latin class) who wanted to read it, so I met privately with my Latin teacher three times a week after school, and we worked our way line by line through Vergil’s tremendous poem. It took the whole year. I loved Vergil’s mastery of meter from the beginning—ah, those great ringing spondees that take your breath away!—but it took longer for me to appreciate the other aspects of those afternoons: the deeper rhythms of the story, the empty quiet classroom, Mr. Cusick’s stiff formality and occasional bursts of impish humor, the seriousness with which he took our work (and which, in time, I came to share).
In high school, I was a Dido partisan. I loved the romance and the high drama of Aeneas’s affair with her. Love at first sight! Sex in a cave! Betrayal! Suicide! It had all the melodrama my little seventeen-year-old heart desired, and I had no interest left for Lavinia, the meek young thing that Aeneas marries at the end of poem. After proud, passionate Dido, she seemed to have no personality; Lavinia simply existed so that Aeneas could fulfill the prophecies that included marrying her, settling in Italy, and building Lavinium.
Ursula K. Le Guin also noticed the thinness of Lavinia’s character; she saw it not as a flaw in the poem but as an opening, a place where there was room for more creative work to be done. And she does it in her book Lavinia. The novel is narrated in the first-person from Lavinia’s perspective, and it tells the story of her life from her days as a princess of Latium before Aeneas and the other Trojans arrive in Italy, through her brief marriage to Aeneas, to the troubled years between Aeneas’s death and the true beginnings of Rome. Given my long attachment to both the Aeneid and Ursula K. Le Guin, I was afraid that I might end up hating the book, but although it’s not perfect I enjoyed it a lot. It is evident that Le Guin has thought seriously about Vergil’s poem, and, in some ways, that’s enough.
There is some postmodern musing at the beginning of the book about Lavinia as a character in Vergil’s epic—how the “real” Lavinia is semi-mythical and lost so far back in time that it’s impossible for even this Lavinia (the one who is narrating to us) to know anything about her. Our narrator is, instead, Vergil’s character. But not entirely, because Vergil’s portrait of Lavinia was so scanty. I was prepared to hate this stuff (“No, no!” I wanted to shout, “just tell the story!”), especially when Vergil himself began appearing to Lavinia as a vision in the sacred grove of Albunea. But to my surprise, it worked! Le Guin does a wonderful job with those quiet conversations between the elderly male poet from the future and his young female creation in the distant past. She captures each of their surprise at being confronted with the other, and creates a perfectly thoughtful, rueful tone for Vergil’s voice.
I also loved the way Le Guin handled the transformation of this story from an epic poem to a novel. In essence this involves bringing humanity and nuance to the aspects of the epic that are formal and stylized. Take, for example, the role of oracle and prophecy in the story. In Vergil (and all ancient narrative) oracles are absolute, but Le Guin renders them human. Prophecies, omens, and oracles all exist in the world of her novel, but there is tension between them and the actions and desires of the humans in the story. The main source of tension in the first half of the book stems from Lavinia’s desire to obey the oracle that told her she must marry a foreigner—she must resist the many forces that try to impel her into marriage with a neighboring king. Le Guin also humanizes Aeneas’s overwhelming pietas, his only real personality trait in the Aeneid. (Note: pietas is a difficult word to translate. The fact that it has a cognate in “piety” makes it tempting to think that they are equivalent but they aren’t, quite. The Latin pietas means more than just religious faith, and encompasses all forms of duty and rightness.) Anyhow, where Vergil describes Aeneas as pious over and over again, Le Guin shows us a thoughtful, careful man, considerate, reflective, and sometimes over-moral.
Le Guin’s book lost momentum for me in the second half, after the death of Aeneas. I’m not sure yet how I feel about her portrait of Aeneas’s son Ascanius, and I was less interested in the problems that came with his attempts to rule his father’s kingdom. Silvius, the son of Lavinia and Aeneas, falls victim to some of the same scanty characterization by Le Guin that Lavinia received from Vergil: he seems less like a real person than like a pawn designed to fill a role. He is the perfect heir that Ascanius is not; he will go on to build the civilization that will one day be Rome; he will take up Aeneas’s great shield. Yes, he will, and that’s all fine, but in the meantime he is a child about whom there is nothing childish.
So the book has its flaws, but it was so very worth reading. Even just for Le Guin's magnificent imagining of life in Italy during the Bronze Age, halfway between barbaric and civilized, in a wooded, half-wild land that would be unrecognizable as the Italy of today. The customs, the warfare, the household religions—all are brought vividly to life.
I thought so much about Mr. Cusick, my old Latin teacher, while reading this book that I thought I might try to contact him. It might be good, I thought, to write him a letter and tell him what I’m doing now, and that I’m glad for all he taught me. But even with the whole big internet at my disposal, I couldn’t find him. Alas.
I read the Aeneid during my senior year in high school, and at times it seemed as though Vergil had written it just so the gods could create trials for me—I am not nearly so pious as Aeneas, but reading it was hard! I was the only fool in my school (even among the students in the advanced Latin class) who wanted to read it, so I met privately with my Latin teacher three times a week after school, and we worked our way line by line through Vergil’s tremendous poem. It took the whole year. I loved Vergil’s mastery of meter from the beginning—ah, those great ringing spondees that take your breath away!—but it took longer for me to appreciate the other aspects of those afternoons: the deeper rhythms of the story, the empty quiet classroom, Mr. Cusick’s stiff formality and occasional bursts of impish humor, the seriousness with which he took our work (and which, in time, I came to share).
In high school, I was a Dido partisan. I loved the romance and the high drama of Aeneas’s affair with her. Love at first sight! Sex in a cave! Betrayal! Suicide! It had all the melodrama my little seventeen-year-old heart desired, and I had no interest left for Lavinia, the meek young thing that Aeneas marries at the end of poem. After proud, passionate Dido, she seemed to have no personality; Lavinia simply existed so that Aeneas could fulfill the prophecies that included marrying her, settling in Italy, and building Lavinium.
Ursula K. Le Guin also noticed the thinness of Lavinia’s character; she saw it not as a flaw in the poem but as an opening, a place where there was room for more creative work to be done. And she does it in her book Lavinia. The novel is narrated in the first-person from Lavinia’s perspective, and it tells the story of her life from her days as a princess of Latium before Aeneas and the other Trojans arrive in Italy, through her brief marriage to Aeneas, to the troubled years between Aeneas’s death and the true beginnings of Rome. Given my long attachment to both the Aeneid and Ursula K. Le Guin, I was afraid that I might end up hating the book, but although it’s not perfect I enjoyed it a lot. It is evident that Le Guin has thought seriously about Vergil’s poem, and, in some ways, that’s enough.
There is some postmodern musing at the beginning of the book about Lavinia as a character in Vergil’s epic—how the “real” Lavinia is semi-mythical and lost so far back in time that it’s impossible for even this Lavinia (the one who is narrating to us) to know anything about her. Our narrator is, instead, Vergil’s character. But not entirely, because Vergil’s portrait of Lavinia was so scanty. I was prepared to hate this stuff (“No, no!” I wanted to shout, “just tell the story!”), especially when Vergil himself began appearing to Lavinia as a vision in the sacred grove of Albunea. But to my surprise, it worked! Le Guin does a wonderful job with those quiet conversations between the elderly male poet from the future and his young female creation in the distant past. She captures each of their surprise at being confronted with the other, and creates a perfectly thoughtful, rueful tone for Vergil’s voice.
I also loved the way Le Guin handled the transformation of this story from an epic poem to a novel. In essence this involves bringing humanity and nuance to the aspects of the epic that are formal and stylized. Take, for example, the role of oracle and prophecy in the story. In Vergil (and all ancient narrative) oracles are absolute, but Le Guin renders them human. Prophecies, omens, and oracles all exist in the world of her novel, but there is tension between them and the actions and desires of the humans in the story. The main source of tension in the first half of the book stems from Lavinia’s desire to obey the oracle that told her she must marry a foreigner—she must resist the many forces that try to impel her into marriage with a neighboring king. Le Guin also humanizes Aeneas’s overwhelming pietas, his only real personality trait in the Aeneid. (Note: pietas is a difficult word to translate. The fact that it has a cognate in “piety” makes it tempting to think that they are equivalent but they aren’t, quite. The Latin pietas means more than just religious faith, and encompasses all forms of duty and rightness.) Anyhow, where Vergil describes Aeneas as pious over and over again, Le Guin shows us a thoughtful, careful man, considerate, reflective, and sometimes over-moral.
Le Guin’s book lost momentum for me in the second half, after the death of Aeneas. I’m not sure yet how I feel about her portrait of Aeneas’s son Ascanius, and I was less interested in the problems that came with his attempts to rule his father’s kingdom. Silvius, the son of Lavinia and Aeneas, falls victim to some of the same scanty characterization by Le Guin that Lavinia received from Vergil: he seems less like a real person than like a pawn designed to fill a role. He is the perfect heir that Ascanius is not; he will go on to build the civilization that will one day be Rome; he will take up Aeneas’s great shield. Yes, he will, and that’s all fine, but in the meantime he is a child about whom there is nothing childish.
So the book has its flaws, but it was so very worth reading. Even just for Le Guin's magnificent imagining of life in Italy during the Bronze Age, halfway between barbaric and civilized, in a wooded, half-wild land that would be unrecognizable as the Italy of today. The customs, the warfare, the household religions—all are brought vividly to life.
I thought so much about Mr. Cusick, my old Latin teacher, while reading this book that I thought I might try to contact him. It might be good, I thought, to write him a letter and tell him what I’m doing now, and that I’m glad for all he taught me. But even with the whole big internet at my disposal, I couldn’t find him. Alas.
