Atonement

Today I taught Virgil, Aeneid 12 — the final book of the epic. Mostly I lectured about

**SPOILER ALERT**

the death of Turnus. When Aeneas kills him, he says (Frederick Ahl’s translation):

Pallas gives you this death-stroke, yes Pallas / Makes you the sacrifice, spills your criminal blood in atonement!

In Latin this is:

Pallas te hoc uulnere, Pallas / immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit.

I hadn’t checked the Latin before class, but as I read Aeneas’ declaration out to my students, I said to them that I did not like this use of atonement. In the context, Aeneas is essentially killing out of revenge, possibly seeking propitiation for Turnus’ killing of Pallas. Now, atonement is often used in contemporary English in the place of propitiation, but its wider use implies something bigger and potentially very different.

Without looking at the Latin, we decided on retribution — propitiation usually involves the gods, after all.

Ahl has a difficult task throughout his translation, because he is trying to translate verse into verse across different languages. But at least he is not trying to match the same number of English iambic pentameters to ancient dactylic hexameters like Emily Wilson does in her Odyssey, since that is essentially impossible without more cutting than usual.

Anyway, ‘spills … in atonement’ renders the Latin ‘poenam … sumit’, which I would take to be ‘exact/inflict the penalty/punishment’.

This is retribution, not atonement.

How are we to differentiate?

Well, maybe this is just the philologist in me, but the English word atonement, while it often comes out meaning ‘retribution’ in contemporary English, does not always mean that today, nor has it historically. Moreover, it is more often used in terms of ‘reparation’ today — that is, one ‘atones for’ one’s crimes.

Atonement, as you likely know, is about the only word in the English theological vocabulary descended from neither Latin nor Greek. It looks like its original meaning — ‘making at one’ or even, dare we try?, ‘one-ing’ or ‘onement’. It comes to take on ideas from propitiation, retribution, reparation, because of its use to refer to how Jesus oned humans and God by taking on human sin, guilt, punishment, etc., and dying.

But because of its use in Christian theology, it strikes me that we should be careful how we use the word atonement, regardless of popular uses. Does Turnus atone for his sin with his death, or does Pallas simply take retribution from Turnus’ blood?

Dido, Queen of Carthage

I have the privilege this semester of teaching Virgil’s Aeneid (on which I’ve blogged here) in English (translation by Frederick Ahl). Last week, we covered Book 4. This is the section of the Aeneid in which Aeneas and Dido have an affair that Dido considers marriage, and in the end, Dido kills herself on a pyre of her stuff, after raging through the streets of Carthage like a bacchante.

In his Confessions, Augustine admits to weeping at Aeneid 4 as a boy.

Normally, when we read the tragedy of Dido, we cannot help feel for her as a woman maltreated by a man. Servius, the fourth-century commentator on Virgil, says that Virgil modelled Dido on Apollonius of Rhodes’ account of Jason and Medea — a love story that, had Apollonius got to the end, closes with the woman abandoned by the man and getting violent revenge. Another parallel, perhaps, is Theseus abandoning Ariadne on Naxos, as recounted in one of Virgil’s intertexts, Catullus 64, a mini-epic about the marriage of Peleus and Thetis.

Elaine Fantham says that Dido is more like Hypsipyle than Medea, of all of Jason’s women, and perhaps even more like Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus — a woman driven to love by scheming divinities whose real target is a man.

Fantham, in her introduction to Ahl’s translation, makes an important point about our reading of Dido:

‘Rather than relive Dido’s sufferings, we must note that she stands for the future of her city. When Dido stabs herself upon the funeral pyre Rumour, the same destructive spirit that precipitated the lovers’ separation, now raves through the city as if all Carthage (like Troy) was falling to enemy occupation and being consumed by flames. The greatest wrong done by Dido’s love for Aeneas was arguably to her own people. –Introduction, xxvii

Normally, we see Dido as a poor woman who has fallen for and succumbed to her womanly passions. I think we should, rather, see Dido as a queen, who has been targeted by Venus and Juno for their own ends, leading to disaster.

We do not, for example, read Turnus the way we read Dido. When he calls for war and rages against the Trojans, we do not say that he has succumbed to his manly passions for war and violence. We rightly acknowledge the role that the Fury Allecto has in Turnus’ turning.

Dido, who first appears being likened to the Goddess Diana and is seen as a self-strong, self-assured political player in Africa who has rejected marriage not only out of loyalty to her dead husband but out of political shrewdness for the future of Carthage, should not simply be reduced to a woman succumbing to the passions of romantic love. She should be seen as a character and a player in her own right.

This changes it. She becomes like Turnus, a victim of Venus and Cupid, and then also of Juno, who meant to favour her. Her wrong, her culpa, also shifts from the private to the public. Dido has not merely had an affair but has endangered the entire Carthaginian enterprise.

In a poem full of political players, this should not be lost.

Why read the Aeneid of Virgil?

Arms and the man I sing

I recently finished my fourth English reading of Virgil’s Aeneid, this time in the translation of Frederick Ahl with an excellent introduction by the late Elaine Fantham (Fantham taught me Latin verse in my MA at Toronto, and I have enormous esteem for her work and great affection for her person).

As with the Iliad, there are good extrinsic reasons to read Virgil’s great epic — all post-Virgilian Latin verse, especially epic, for one thing. Even Ovid’s Amores — a magnificent series of elegiac love poetry — are haunted by Virgil, beginning with the word arma. Also, Dante (whom I also love) and Milton (Milton also has some Lucan in him — and Lucan is, in many ways, the anti-Virgil). Or if, like me, you’re a Bernini fan:

Someone somewhere once called the Aeneid the epic poem of Europe. We are all, for good or ill, wrapped up in the great European cultural project, from Homer to Star Trek. The Aeneid permeates much of this, and not only poetry, but philosophy at least as early as Seneca, theology in Augustine, and the visual arts. Oh, and Purcell’s opera, Dido and Aeneas. As I said about The Iliad:

not reading [it] means you are missing out on an integral part of your own cultural heritage and thus not leading a full life

Other reasons? So many. Here are three.

First, duty. This is perhaps a reason to read the Aeneid today. Over and over and over again in the Aeneid, the titular hero is ‘pius Aeneas’ — falsely rendered ‘pious’. Ahl goes for ‘righteous’, Heaney for ‘filled with devotion’. Aeneas, for all his faults (we’ll get to those), is a man who knows what his destiny is (okay, most of us don’t have gods and ghosts helping us out in that regard), and he does what is necessary to that end. He single-mindedly seeks to do his duty to his fate.

He is also a devoted son, father, husband — he seeks to do his duty to Anchises, his father, whom he carries away from Troy in spite of Anchises’ protestations. He also brings his son Iulus/Ascanius. He wishes to bring his wife Creusa, but she is slain in the god-rendered destruction of Troy.

Aeneas fulfils his duty to the gods. He brings with him his household gods from Troy to give them a new home. He performs sacrifices to the gods. He fulfils vows to the gods. He also fulfis his duty to the dead by giving them proper burial when possible.

In an age where we shirk duty when possible and do whatever we please, perhaps we could learn from Aeneas?

But — well, then there’s the second reason. Ambiguity. Is pius Aeneas always pious? Think of his own aristeia, the needless slaughter of so many Latins. The killing of his great foe. His manipulation and abandonment of Dido. Aeneas can be a violent, dangerous man. Not all of the killing in this poem is just, and some of the unjust killing is on the part of Aeneas, pius or not.

This is part of why I love this poem. Maybe we need to think about duty. But Virgil doesn’t avoid the muck. Death. War. Violence. Betrayal. These are the stuff of the crooked ways of humans. And his great, beautiful, heart-wrenching poetry draws you and pulls you. It’s an amazing poem — people like me want to find ‘morals’ to the story: Devoted Aeneas! But Virgil says, ‘Oh, but — violent Aeneas, angry Aeneas, shameless Aeneas, woman-abandoning Aeneas…’

Both Aeneases are real. That’s part of the beauty of the poem.

And so the third: The Aeneid is beautiful in Latin, beautiful in a good English translation. If you are Latin-less, get Fagles (Penguin) or Ahl (Oxford). Read it in verse — Dryden, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’ve not read C. Day Lewis’s. Death can be beautiful when narrated by the greatest poet of the Latin language. Storms at sea can grip you. Even catalogues of Romans take on something beyond expected glory when rendered in dactylic hexameter.

There is power in Virgil’s verse. I find this hard to put into words, which probably makes me a bad critic. But maybe beauty isn’t quite right as the third reason. This is a magnificent, complex poem, referring backwards and forwards to itself. The action and the set descriptions are carefully paced to keep your interest. The relationship to Homer is there at first sight, and suddenly more complex at fourth read. Read the Aeneid because it is … wondrous.

I have a friend who hates the term ‘instant classic’. Nothing, she says, is an instant classic. Well, Virgil was. He was taught in schools almost as soon as he existed. Already, his contemporaries had to find new things to do. This poem could not be ignored by Ovid. Lucan, in his choice of the grotesque horror of civil war, had to do something completely different, composing verse in the shadow the great Virgil.

The Aeneid is a rich, powerful, complex, beautiful poem about destiny, about duty, and about the ambiguities of life as lived by mortals who are trying to do their duty and fulfil their destinies. Read it. Then read it again.

#philologywillsavetheworld

Also: check out my post about The Odyssey!

Fortune favours the bold (but does she?)

Wheel. Of. Fortuune! (Carmina Burana, page with ‘O Fortuna’; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4660, f. 1r)

One evening, my wife and I were walking with a friend who needed to catch a bus. As we waited to a cross a mildly busy street, we saw the bus on approach. I called out, ‘Fortune favours the bold!’ and ran across the street to hold the bus for them. This event stands out as one of my ‘loud in public and never to be forgotten moments’ (up there with ‘Gandalf is just a wizard’).

But I’m not sold on Fortune’s favour. The famous instance of someone making this proclamation is Pliny the Elder on his approach to Pompeii during Vesuvius’ eruption. He directs the ships towards the volcano:

‘Fortes’ inquit ‘fortuna iuvat.’

They evacuated some people (so maybe Fortune did favour him?), but, after strapping pillows to his head to keep the rocks from hurting him, Pliny the Elder stayed behind to observe this natural phenomenon. You can read about it in his nephew’s letters, Pliny the Younger, Letters, 6.16.

I will have the joy of teaching Vergil’s Aeneid at UBC this Autumn, and I’ve been rereading it preparation. Here we see, Book 10.284, Turnus:

‘audentis Fortuna iuuat.’

Unfortunately for Turnus, the fates are against him. He and the other Italians may do very well in the ensuing battle, but by the end of Book 10, Aeneas has essentially become a giant, an elemental force of destruction. And at the end of Book 12, Turnus will lose his life.

If Turnus had been prudent, had not slain Pallas, he may have lived long enough to gain some sort of reprieve, or a treaty, or something. Instead, his daring (Latin audeo means ‘to dare’) brings destruction on many of his people and ultimately his death. The Trojans win this war, ultimately, and make marriage alliances with the people of Ausonia.

How much easier it would have been for everyone without Turnus’ boldness.

Not, one hastens to add, that this exonerates Aeneas of his Incredible Hulk-style ragefest of slaughter.

Ultimately, Fortune favours … no one. This is a main theme in Beothius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Fortune smiled on him for a time — a good marriage, the joint consulship of his sons. That sort of thing. But now he’s rotting in prison, doomed to die. This is the way the Wheel of Fortune turns. One may be king, at the top, one day, and a peasant at the bottom the next.

Fortune is fickle. Fortune may favour the bold Turnus today, only to have him slaughtered at the hand of his enemy the next.

In order to attain a state of lasting felicity, one must fix one’s attention on things beyond the domain of Fortune, fixing one’s heart on things above. This is what philosophy is for, and this is what Boethius is taught in the Consolation.

Reading Vergil, and seeing forces driven by Fate or the gods, this is worth thinking about.

The Sorrows of Aeneas

This is a brief thought that floated through my mind whilst reading W F Jackson Knight’s translation of Aeneid V this evening, for there we see Aeneas encounter his father, Anchises’, ghost. As Anchises fades from sight, having given his pius son advice, Aeneas cries:

Where do you go in this haste, so soon? Where dart away? Whom are you hurrying to escape? And who denies you to my embrace?

The above is not the first time we meet Aeneas in a situation such as this. In Book I, we see him encounter his mother, Venus, who has taken on the form of a young maiden out hunting (sort of a sexy Artemis). As she departs, her son realises who it is with whom he’s been talking. Aeneas laments her swift departure as well as the fact that she’d fooled him — again.

This seems to be habitual behaviour on the part of Venus, ‘Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas’ (Lucretius 1.1)

As we learn over the course of the next two books, where Virgil’s narratology employs the methods of Homer’s Odyssey through a first-person narration of the past as told by a character in the book, Aeneas has had a terrible time of it. His wife, Creusa, died in the sack of Troy. When her ghost appeared to him, he attempted to embrace her three times, and three times he failed. Then his dad died. Then, after a lot of wandering, we get to the storm with which Virgil opens his epic.

So he meets his mother in the woods, and she doesn’t even have the decency to reveal herself to him and be a mother (Mehercule!). By this stage, Aeneas is probably feeling sort of like, “Really? Again?”

Then there’s the whole Dido thing (see Acts 3-5 of Berlioz’s masterpiece Les Troyens or Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas for this one), following which we have the “funeral” (one-year anniversary of death?) games for Anchises, in the midst of which four ships get burnt by women driven mad by Juno (Juno likes to choose women as her tools in this epic, and she also likes to provoke madness).

Book VI involves more death and sorrow for pius Aeneas — Aeneas comes face to face with his own failures at pietas as he beholds Dido in the Underworld. And then he lands in Latium, where he gets to spend the second half of the epic fighting a war over a girl betrothed to him in a perfectly normal, binding, arranged marriage. At the last, Pallas is slain and Aeneas turns into Achilles (cf. Iliad 21) against the people he is destined to rule.

When you look over the 12 books of the Aeneid, Aeneas gets very few breaks. After losing his entire culture and city along with his wife due to the devious scheming of polytropos Odysseus and his big horse, he tries settling down but never has the opportunity to rest. His dad dies along the way. He meets a nice girl, but that ends badly. So he follows destiny, fulfilling his obligations as a good, pius Roman, only to face a war in which the gods themselves are against him.

Perhaps these sorrows and the fact that he keeps fighting both for his people — that remnant of Troy that was — and for the will of the gods (save for in that whole Dido thing) are what make Aeneas not only pius but also Virgil’s other favoured adjective for this hero, egregius — outstanding.

Pius — that acts according to duty, dutiful; esp. that performs what is due to the gods and religion in general, to parrents, kindred, teachers, country; pious, devout, conscientious, affectionate, tender, kind, good, grateful, respectful, loyal, patriotic, etc. (of persons and things) (from Lewis & Short)