The Aeneid of Virgil

VIRGIL'S AENEID IS, of course, a major poem; it is also a great and beautiful one. The scope of an epic requires, in the writing, a designed variety, a calculated unevenness, now and then some easy-going carelessness. So the reader win find, here and there, transitional passages, the stock epithet, the conventional phrase, a few lines of vamping, and, in this or that line, what the Spanish call ripios. Over and above these matters of small detail, in the large panorama the reader will find valleys as well as peaks, dry ravines as well as upland meadows: the landscape is not always the same height above sea level, and its flora and fauna vary more than a little. The epic terrain of the Odyssey differs greatly from that of the Iliad, and both Iliad and Odyssey differ from the Aeneid, but there is nothing obtrusive in Virgil's relatively studied concern with composition. Less wild and "natural," the demesnes of the Aeneid have their full measure of more than pleasant countryside, loftiness also, majesty, grandeur. Virgil, we have been told, wanted to burn the Aeneid; he was not satisfied with it. This attitude, it seems to me, reflects fatigue and exhaustion of spirit rather than considered literary judgment. The last revisions are always the most enervating, and Virgil, one can well believe, having worked on the poem for over a decade, had reached the point where he felt he would rather do anything, including die, than go over the poem one more time. If we had never known the poem was believed incomplete, we would, I think, find it difficult to decide which were the unsatisfactory portions. Who wants an epic poem absolutely perfect, anyway? and how could the Aeneid be improved, really? A charge is brought against the Aeneid that it is propaganda. I do not know when this criticism first came to be brought; I suspect it is only our own time, with its persistent devotion to all the aspects of advertising and sloganeering, that feels sufficiently guilty about these activities to project the accusation across twenty centuries. Virgil, with whatever cheerfulness his nature was capable of, would readily have agreed that the Aeneid was propaganda; but then he did not know the invidious connotations of the word,he would have taken it to mean only "things that ought to be propagated." An institute of propaganda analysis would be completely baffled by the Aeneid; the conclusion might be that the poem was either the best or the worst propaganda that had ever been written. What kind of propaganda is it to begin a nationalist epic with the sorrowful sigh, "It was such a great burden,a millstone around the neckto found the Roman race"? What kind of propaganda is it to make the enemies, by and large, more interesting and sympathetic and colorful fellows than our own side? Lausus and Mezentius, for example, are a far more engaging father-and-son combination than Aeneas-Anchises, Aeneas-Ascanius, or Evander-Pallas. Dido and Camilla command our admiration much more than the blushing Lavinia or the fading Creusa. We respond to Turnus, and are at best coldly respectful to Aeneas. What goes on here, anyway? Shouldn't some patriotic organization investigate this subversive writer, secretly in the pay of a foreign power? On the other hand, it is just possible that this is the very best form which national propaganda can take, the implicit and pervasive doctrine that great and good as our enemies may be, we can admire them, surpass them, be just to them, and not be afraid of them, either.

Dettagli