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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you live from the Stanford campus.
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Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written,
must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race.
For it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue,
unless our civilization itself be regarded as such a transcript.
Later writers say what we will of their genius have rarely,
if ever he quelled the elaborate beauty and finish of the lifelong and heroic literary labor of the ancients.
They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them.
They will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius
that will enable us to attend to and appreciate them.
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Did anyone recognize a quote I just read?
I know Andrea Nightingale did.
Hi Andrea.
I was reading from Henry David Thoreau's Walden.
Thoreau lived for two years in a tiny log cabin he built for himself in the woods.
There was nothing in it except the bare essentials, a bucket, maybe a broom, a chair and a table.
And on the table, Greek and Roman classics, which as you can gather from the quote he read in the original.
His interest in the classics wasn't antiquarian.
It was from those books that Thoreau learned what it would take to invent a father tongue for his new nation.
Thesis, almost all the great thinkers and writers of the modern era knew their classics and knew them well.
Hypothesis.
We ignored the ancients at our own peril.
We tend to forget that until relatively recently American education was based wholly on Greek and Latin foundations.
Think of it.
As a high school or Thomas Jefferson used to translate the Greek Bible into Latin and vice versa.
It was set of President James A. Garfield that in moments of boredom or to amuse his friends,
he would take a pencil in each hand and compose sentences in Greek and Latin at the same time.
Nowadays the American presidency, no, no, I vowed to myself I would not get into that.
So we'll just let it slide.
It was not so very long ago that a university professor in the classroom would leave Greek and Latin quotes untranslated.
Then he began to provide a translation for the Greek but not for the Latin.
Nowadays he must tell his students that there were once such things as the Greek and Latin tongues,
that there once was a place called Athens, that there was once a Roman Empire.
Pretty soon the professor won't know even that much.
Oh, he'll know it in a way, but he won't know what to make of it.
And when you don't know what to make of something, you eventually forget about it.
Friends, Romans and countrymen, have you looked at a dollar bill recently?
I mean, really looked at it.
I would like to ask you if you're listening to pull out a dollar bill right now and check it out.
Don't do this if you're driving, though. I don't want any road accidents on my conscience.
But the rest of you, please pull out a dollar bill.
Let me give one to my guest, Susanna, who I'm going to introduce to you in just a minute.
So are you all with me?
Okay, on the backside of the dollar bill, you have the great seal of the United States of America.
Check it out.
Look at all those hieroglyphs.
In the circle on the right, there's an eagle without spread wings, the eagle.
The bald eagle is our national symbol.
But it's not our national symbol because it represents American freedom or the American wilderness.
No, the eagle is the Roman bird of the auspices, the bird of jove.
And it's talons holding the fashes of Roman symbol of unity.
It's right talons, grip a laurel branch, yet another classical symbol.
On the ribbons above the eagle's head, a prudibus unum.
Now look at the left circle that weird Masonic symbol of a pyramid with an eye at the top.
Above the pyramid, more Latin, Anuit keptis.
Anuit keptis.
God favors our undertakings.
That, believe it or not, comes from Virgil's Anid book six.
At the bottom more Latin, Novus orodo seculorum, a new order of the ages.
Novus orodo seculorum, a new world order as it were.
That's also Virgil from his fourth echlog.
It's amazing what you get in a dollar bill.
Question, why is the great seal of the United States speaking in Latin?
Why is it talking Virgil?
What does America have to do with Rome?
Can we really understand what the founding of this nation was all about if we don't know anything about Rome?
It's republic as well as its empire.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, the ancient classics are not superannuated works that have nothing to do with us.
Anymore than the word superannuated has nothing to do with Latin.
They have everything to do with us.
They may in fact be more relevant to our times than any books ever written.
That's why we're going to devote the next hour to discussing one of the greatest poets of the whole ancient gang of them, Virgil himself.
Who was Virgil?
What do we have to learn from him?
Why are we living today in what we might call a Virgilian age?
These are some of the questions we'll be raising with my special guests, Susanna Braun,
who joins me here in the studios of KZSU, Susanna welcomed the program.
Thanks, Robert.
It would be helpful if I turn on your microphone.
Thanks, Robert.
Yeah.
Susanna Braun is a professor of classics here at Stanford.
She specializes in Latin literature and its reception in the modern era.
She's uniquely qualified to address some of these weighty topics with us.
Susanna, you've only been at Stanford for a year,
and before that you were teaching at Yale.
That's right.
And you are from England originally.
I am.
And I noticed if I may say so that you have a great poster on your office door of the mug shots and fingerprints of Jim Morrison
that were taken by the New Haven Police after he was arrested on stage during a doors concert in New Haven.
That's right.
I've never seen that poster where did you get it?
I got it in New Haven, Connecticut.
I thought if New Haven, Connecticut is famous for Yale, then maybe I should display on my office door something that New Haven, Connecticut was infamous for the arrest of Jim Morrison.
Yeah.
But still, sometimes infamous things create kind of living memory, long-term memory.
So are you a Jim Morrison fan?
Yeah.
That's good.
Because the only diehard Morrison fan among the faculty that I knew so I'm coming out, there's at least two of us.
I'm sure there's more.
I just not known to me.
Susanna, we're going to talk about Virgil and some of these questions were raising, but not to take anything for granted for our listeners.
Can we just remind ourselves, who was Virgil, when he was writing, why is he one of these great poets of the ancient Golden Age?
Well, you've asked a whole bunch of questions there. Well, he was writing in what we call the first century BCE.
He was born in North Italy, in Mantua, in 70 BCE, and he died in 17 BC.
Not having completed the in-eared his big epic poem.
Prior to that, he had worked on all his poetry. It's wonderful. I should just say that.
He'd written some pastoral poetry, which we call the air clogs, which are meditations on loss and love.
Set in the countryside, but often with city and war, things intruding into the countryside.
So a real balance of optimism and pessimism, and that maybe is his hallmark throughout all of his poetic works.
So a very delicate set of ten short poems, very carefully crafted, that's the air clogs.
And then he wrote his work that we call the Georgics. I work in four books of middling length.
And these are, if you look at it superficially, the Georgics is a manual for the farmer, but that's not really what the poem is at all,
because the had the Romans knew about farming and they had prose manuals that they could turn to if they really wanted to know what time of year to sew their crops,
and what kind of bugs would attack their crops and so on and so forth.
Thirdly, Georgics is much more meditation, I think, about the relationship between human beings and nature.
And again, he gives us different aspects and different parts of the poem. Sometimes he gives us a picture of human beings and nature in cooperation so that nature pulls forth her bounty for human beings.
Other times in the poem, he represents the human beings as having to impose their will on nature and having to really act violently in order to extract their produce from the ground.
And the poem is held in a very fine balance and it's true of the echlogs, it's true of the georgics and it's true of the anneodus will discuss that different critics read these poems differently.
Some people read these poems pessimistically and some people read them optimistically.
We'll get into that.
The great seal of the United States that no one or the sickle load comes from the fourth echlog that you were just talking about.
Now that echlog has had quite a history after Virgil, it's a very special, at least during the Middle Ages, the Christians saw it as somehow prefiguring the coming of Christ on the part of a poet who was born, obviously before Christ died before Christ.
What is the fourth echlog about? Why does America take a quote from the fourth echlog?
And what can we say about its importance?
Yeah, it's the best known of these ten short poems. It's a poem that celebrates the birth of a child.
And the birth of the child is taken to symbolize the beginning of a new golden age. It's really a utopian poem, it's full of utopian motifs.
And Virgil imagines the child being born and then growing into a boy and then growing into adolescence.
And at each stage of the child's life, this is a further step towards the golden age.
The Romans, I'll, the ancients generally seem to think that this, this whole life has a decline from a golden age in the distant past.
So, Virgil to celebrate a return to the golden age says something about what he's feeling at that moment in time.
So, we call the fourth echlog, it's often called the Messianic echlog because people have interpreted the child as being Christ.
However, I should say that this debate about who the child was was in doubt even in antiquity within a few years after Virgil's death.
The poem itself was written in 40 BCE, so it's 40 years even before the birth of Christ.
And the poem is dedicated to the console, the Roman console of that year has a guy called Polio.
And the political context is not irrelevant here. Virgil is writing at a time of great uncertainty.
We've had the assassination of Julius Caesar for years before 44 BCE, and there's chaos in Rome.
The power is in the hands of a triumvirate, Anthony and Octavian who will future in future be the emperor Augustus and Lapidus.
So, three of them are struggling for power.
And nobody could have known in 40 BCE, which of those three guys would have come out on top. And if you had to put a bet on it in 40 BCE, you would have said Anthony.
I'm sure you would have said Anthony. Octavian was his sidekick and also very sickly.
And we hadn't seen his vision and his military success and his falseness at this point.
Was it Cleopatra of it? Had it not been for Cleopatra would it have been Anthony?
Yes, probably. No whole world would have turned out differently. Maybe that's too big a statement, but European history would have turned out differently.
Because if Anthony had won, he would have made his capital in the East in Alexandria in Egypt.
And I think lots of things would have been very different.
The first sure source that we have that identifies explicitly identifies the child in this poem as Christ is Augustine around 400 CE.
And this is because of various similarities in the prophecy that Virgil gives us in the poem.
Similarities to Old Testament passages, Isaiah in particular.
And what Virgil is doing here in this poem is actually deploying some material from the sibiline oracles, which the Romans respected very much and turned to at times of crisis and strife.
And Virgil is definitely using terminology that we find in the sibiline oracles, which foretell a savior.
But to take that step of reading this as reading Virgil as a proto-Christian is a very big step. I mean, it's not uncommon once you've got the Christian empire.
They want to appropriate a lot of pagan material, pagan poetry. But it's a very totalizing view, which I think is completely unjustified.
Yeah, I'm not willing to agree with you entirely yet on that because I hope when we start getting into the Aniad, we might find that for someone like Dante, you know, probably the most Christian poet who ever wrote.
So we know when Dante wakes up in the dark wood and he's completely lost and bewildered, it's Virgil, the ghost of Virgil.
He's been dead for 1300 years who comes to rescue him and becomes his guide throughout the whole journey through hell and even up the mountain of Purgatory.
And for Dante, it was not just the fourth echlog in the prophecy of a new world order because of a child being born, but he saw, like many other people in Virgil, a kind of proto-Christian ethos about the need for...
certain kind of mercy and justice and various other things. So perhaps when we start discussing the Aniad, I'll try to make the case that if you were a Christian in the Middle Ages, reading the Aniad could give you grounds for seeing in him a kind of Christian sensibility about the kind of compassion for the vanquished.
And a certain ethic of mercy and justice, but we'll say that...
Well, in fact, why don't we turn to the Aniad since the time goes very quickly on this program as one of my experiences here.
So the Aniad, the great ethic, as we know that Octavian then becomes a gustist, becomes the first real emperor of the Roman Empire, wins out over his rivals.
And Virgil writes this ethic in order to ostensibly celebrate the founding of the Roman Empire and to glorify it.
Yeah. That's right. Virgil is living at this pivotal moment in history as it turns out all the way.
I'm not sure that he or his contemporaries could have known exactly how pivotal it is.
But as you say, Robert, it's the moment when we go from Republic to Empire.
Actually, scholars really debate the exact date of that. Was it the Battle of Actim when Octavian defeated the fleet of Cleopatra and Aniad?
Or was it in... That was 31 BCE? Or was it in 27 BCE when Octavian actually takes on the name or gustus?
There's two of the possibilities. There are a number of others.
Virgil does seem to be responding to the political context in which he's writing in that if you think about the previous several decades that he's lived through, there's been so much strife that's been civil warfare.
And the Romans killing Romans. Instead of conquering the rest of the world, Romans have been shedding one another's blood.
And there have been lots of changes, very unhappy changes in Italy itself with soldiers, veteran soldiers being given land and people being driven from their ancestral homesteads.
That's actually a theme that he treats in the eclogs. So, along comes Octavian and he brings peace.
So, peace after years and years of warfare and uncertainty, you can see why somebody, a poet, might want to celebrate that.
And he's writing the Aniad about a tenure period from 29 BCE until his death in 19 BCE.
He felt he had another three years work to do on it. It's unfinished according to Virgil. And he actually asked Augustus to have it burned on his deathbed.
That was his final request. And it is Augustus we have to thank for the fact that the poem survives.
So, Virgil is celebrating a new era. I would say this is the era that he is hoping for back in the fourth at clog written ten years earlier.
But he couldn't really have known what form that would take. But for his subject, he goes back into ancient times.
He goes back to an ancient myth, a myth of Inius who's a Trojan. And this is story.
Can I just trouble a little bit? Let's say an ancient story.
You know, myth, the Shliemann, you know, everyone thought that Homer was all the myth.
The guy took his home or under his arm, went there, followed all the indices of the Texan.
Do you discover Troy? So, yes, no. I mean, Inius could be a myth, but you never know with these ancient texts how much of a substrate of actual literal truth there might have been.
Sure, no, sure. We don't. And you're right to call me on that. In fact, I don't really want to make a strong distinction between myth and history in those ancient periods.
The main thing is that there were Romans who believed that their race came from a band of refugees who traveled west after the defeat of Troy, the sack of Troy, by the Greeks.
And mostly, I think, memorized, memorized for us now by Brad Pitt as Achilles, Julie Christie as his mother, Fettuce, who can forget that.
So, we have a bunch of refugees, and by the way, if you watch very carefully in the movie, Troy, Inius does just get a few seconds there.
Nice. I haven't seen the movie myself, you know. There are certain books that you love so much that you don't want to see the movie of them because you have your own image.
But, yeah, yeah, there were all the world moments for classes. There are moments of pain when you watch a movie like that. But on the whole, I'm very much proofing of classics on film.
I'll see it then.
So, it's so the Anias is a Trojan, and he's offered the defeat of Troy. Yes.
They're all the refugees from that. Thanks for the city. And they travel. He believes he has this mission to found a new city in the West.
And he doesn't know where it is going to be. So, he sets off. He takes with him his father and Cysys and his son, Asgania, who's also called Ullus.
And it's from that name that the Julian clan that Julie is Caesar belong to take their name.
So, just to come forward in time for a moment, Julie is Caesar's family claimed that they were descended from Ullus, the son of Inius, who was the son of Venus.
Venus, Venus, the goddess, coupled with Anchysys to produce Inius.
So, he sets off with his father and his son and a band of refugees, and very importantly with the household gods from Troy.
And he sets off new travels all around the Mediterranean and settles here there and everywhere, tries to build a new Troy, and keeps on running into setbacks and having to be moved on.
And he reaches the Promised Land, which is Hesberia, the Western Land, that's Italy. And he's told that that's where he should found a city.
What's curious is that inius, actually, all of the poem is a poem about the foundation of Rome.
Inius himself never found Rome, and his son doesn't found Rome.
That has to wait for a bit later in history, the story of Romulus.
Yeah, many generations. Yeah, many generations. Yeah, that's right.
But, Virgil and his poem manages to look forward to the Roman future and to incorporate things that would be recent Roman history for his readers, his contemporary readers, which are in the midst of time of the future for Inius.
And he manages to do that because in the very centre of the poem, in fact in book 6, from which comes Anne-Ritkepthis, he descends into the underworld,
into Hades, to visit his dead father, who died in the meantime.
And he sees all his ancestors on the one hand, but then, in Kais, he's his father, shows him the whole future lineage that's going to come out of him.
And we get this whole procession of the future kings of Rome and then up to Augusta himself, no?
That's right. Augusta is one of the descendants on him Virgil spends longest.
Yeah, the Inid is a poem in 12 books. It's an epic poem. It's in the same meter as Homer's poems in Greek.
That's it. This is a poem in Latin. It's very long. It's elaborate.
And the 12 books have what I would like to call an architectonic structure, very carefully structured disposition, so that we have four important passages of prophecy in the poem, which are placed very, very carefully,
by Virgil in the first book, "To Pritakef's a Prophecy, to Venus of what her descendants are going to do and be."
And then as you've just said, Robert, in the sixth book, when Inid goes down into the underworld, has to be very brave to do that.
He has to pluck the golden bow from the tree to go down.
And he's shown this parade of the future by his dead father and Kaisies.
And then in book eight, just as he's fighting his wars in Italy, it's not easy once he even gets to Italy, he still has to take on a lot of military activity and overcome the native Italians.
And at the end of book eight, his mother Venus gives him new armor, including a shield.
And on the shield we have scenes of future Roman history, future for Inus, and past for Virgil's readers.
And then the final passage of prophecy is at the very end of book twelve, just before the final day, Newmont, when Inus kills Ternus, when Jupiter says to his wife,
"You know who is opposed Inus all along. She's the kind of cause of delay. She's the blocking character, the obstacle to the foundation of Rome."
She finally becomes reconciled to the idea that Rome has to happen. Jupiter promises her that the Italians, whom she is supporting, will merge with the Trojans.
And the Trojan identity will actually disappear. They will become Latins from the area of Italy that they're living in, Latium.
They'll become Latins and their language will be Latin. So we have these four important passages of prophecy scattered throughout the poem, not scattered, that's not the right word to use, but placed very carefully at very important points.
And yeah, the end of book six, when Inus sees the parade of the future descendants of the line he's going to establish, that's really important.
It's a highly political passage because it celebrates both Julius Caesar and then Augustus, who was Julius Caesar's adopted son. And that's one of the real high points of the poem.
Yeah, and we should remind artists that a lot of Virgil's Aniid is based on Homer's two epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
I mean, the kind of conventional wisdom is that the first six books of the Aniid are like the Odyssey and so far as they represent all the wanderings of the hero of the refugee.
Whereas the second half of the Aniid, which deals with the wars with the native Latins, is like the Iliad. And of course, there's a way in which Virgil, who's known for his piety, or at least Anis is called the pious Anis for various reasons.
Like one of them being that he has a complete sort of respect and obedience for his father and for his forefathers. And he'll carry on anchisies on his shoulders fleeing, you know, the burning city of Troy.
But also, that scene, let me ask you this about the book six of the Aniid. I know that you have the architectonic and so.
But for my own curiosity, if you compare Odysseus' visit to the dead in book 11 of the Odyssey with what Virgil does with that scene, the remarkable differences.
I think when you're pointing out that it's very political and Virgil, and it's also completely male dominated. These are the forefathers and the sons to come.
In Homer, that the dead are mostly women, and it's a very domestic sort of personal private experience, whereas Virgil is a highly politicized scene.
That's a really good point, because the Odyssey is really a poem about a man, Odysseus, and he sets off to get home from Troy with his followers, his crew.
But by the time he gets back, he's mislaid all of them. So he's a really an individual, and this is an important difference between Homer and Virgil.
Virgil is making his wandering hero the leader of a band of refugees, and he always has to think of the well-being of the band. He's responsible for bringing these people safely to Italy.
He's an adult in a certain sense. He's still there, he's like a young man who can take his time, hang out with Kyush Jee and Khalipso and so forth.
That's right.
But you're right, there's a sense of responsibility of that.
That way is heavily on him.
It certainly does, and this is why people often haven't really warmed to Inias as a hero.
He seems rather cold and unemotional, which is actually very unfair on him, because if you read the poem carefully, he weeps.
I agree.
Quite often actually. But he's kind of more of a, he's more proper.
And I think Virgil's really using him as a way of exploring what it might be to be a Roman and how to come into the Roman idea of,
I'm going to use the English word, virtue, but it's not a good translation for the Latin word, "vir tus."
Vir tus in Latin is the quality of being a "vir," a man, so a much better translation would be manliness or masculinity or heroism.
And that's one of the things Virgil is trying to lay out, I think, in the poem.
He's trying to explore how Inias turns from a warrior, from the Homeric poems, into this, this foretaste of the great leader of the Romans,
that Augustus, he hopes, will be.
And so he is exploring a lot of virtues, what we would call virtues.
This word is too overlaid and with Christian resonances to be really useful, but I don't think we have another word.
So Vir tus like courage and justice and piety and mercy that you mentioned a little while ago.
Yeah.
So he has a distinctly Roman signature to his personality.
Absolutely, yeah.
He's not just a free-wonder, free-wielding kind of...
No.
And so emerges from Hell and we arrive in Italy and we have the wars.
And as you said, there's a...
He ends up defeating, or there's a merging of the native populations with...
And he says, "Here, let's step outside of the poem a minute."
You said that Julius Caesar traces his lineage back to Julian so...
But the fact of the matter is that Inias is an adopted ancestor of the Romans.
He was not a talk-the-ness legend or myth.
It's really in the late Republican period, if I remember correctly, that the Romans kind of actively and almost deliberately embraced him.
And made him by adoption, you know, the founding father of the Romans.
Yeah.
This is extraordinary.
Not only that, we're talking about the greatest city and empire, certainly of the ancient world, probably ever.
In terms of power and it's kind of the way it's administration, conquering the Mediterranean and so forth.
Why would the Romans who were really at that, not at the height of their power perhaps,
were still very powerful civilization at the time?
Why would they choose an ancestor that comes from a bank?
Why would they trace their genealogy back to a vanquished city?
It doesn't sound very triumphalistic.
No, it doesn't in a way, but it's very, very old.
That would be one answer.
By the way, the Julian family is not the only Roman family to look back to Trojan forefathers.
But in a way, you just have to take the extra step, Robert, and it's a way of tracing your ancestry back to a god or goddess.
In this case, Venus.
And we find other Roman families trace their families back to other gods or demigods, like Hercules, for example.
That's, that's, he figures in other family trees.
So if you go back far enough, you're not going to be held to the same criteria of evidence.
So you can go back to these ancient stories, myths, history, whatever we want to call them, and claim gods and goddesses in your ancestry.
Yeah, but I think there's more to it in that, this, the whole first half of the need, especially,
is about the sufferings of the refugees.
It's about getting into what it means to be a defeated people.
And what's so remarkable about Anias is that he's not just a Roman.
He's first and foremost a human being who knows what it means to be on the losing side.
And if there were not this dimension in the Inia, I don't think it would have survived these two millennia.
And so, yeah, I understand that the Romans might want to claim Venus as their goddess.
But there is this insistence in the poem about the experience of defeat and exile and continued suffering.
And always these false starts, you know, Anias thinks he's gotten there, but he hasn't gotten there.
And then he gets to Carthage and he has, he's there with Diodo and he thinks that that might be the right place.
Nobody has to keep going and he has to sacrifice a lot for him.
So I think that the, and also, correct me if I'm wrong, there's the Roman Empire by this point that the great sort of virtue,
one of the virtues, where they presume to, well,
is the doctrine of sparing the vanquished, sparing the defeated.
So do you think this is a distinctly Roman or was it just rhetoric?
Well, we'll talk about that when we talk about the end of the poem, perhaps maybe we don't want to get into it now, but do you agree with the
Roman Empire?
So the Roman mission is summed up in those two phrases and what kind of gloss you want to put on the eniered and on Roman civilization.
We'll always depend whether you put the balance on the sparing or the conquering, because that's what the Romans do.
But one reason for thinking that the Roman Empire lasts as long as it does is that they have a capacity to do both and to assimilate the people that they conquer.
That seems to be very important in Roman history. I think that's one reason the Roman Empire lasts so long.
Well, yeah, again, I keep looking at the cock and I say, "How are we ever going to cover these things that we want to talk about in the 20 minutes that remain?"
So let's take that part about sparing the conquered and hearing the appeals for mercy from the humbled.
And let's move to the end of the eniered, which is a battle. It's hand-to-hand combat, almost like a gladiatorial contest between Anias, the leader of the Trojans, and Trueness, who is the leader of a certain clan of the dead.
That's right, he's the native Italian prince.
Anias, with the help from the gods, obviously, defeats Ternus, or at least he's gotten the better of him in battle.
And then what happens?
Yeah.
This is a very, we're talking about the very end of the poem.
That's very, yeah.
We might actually want to read from it later, but...
Yeah, sure. We can do that.
Yeah, Ternus has also had some divine assistance, but after Jupiter has this chat with his wife, Juno, and says, "You can't resist the force of fate. The Roman Empire is...
The Roman race is going to be founded." She pulls out her assistance to Ternus, and he's on his own, and there he is.
Anias has beaten him.
So, Ternus, in front of all the Italian people watching and all the Trojans, says to Anias, "You have conquered me.
You can have live in here because they're not only fighting over a woman, of course, but it's really. It's more than that."
You've won, he says.
All I ask of you is that you return me or my body to my father.
And at that point, Anias hesitates for the longest time.
He doesn't know whether to kill Ternus or not.
And at that crucial moment, his eyes fall upon a trophy that Ternus is wearing.
This is the Baldrick that he has stripped from a young man called Palas, who fought for Anias and been killed by him.
So, this is a virtual remodeling Achilles and Patroclus here in the relationship between Anias and Palas.
And Anias feels absolutely awful when he's reminded of the death of Palas because he...
He falls into a rage. He falls into a rage. He falls into a furrow. It's a Latin word, fury.
And at that moment, he's kind of overcome and he kills Ternus.
And he says, "It's Palas who's really killing you. This is an act of retribution."
And sacrifice even, I think.
Yes, that's right. And the closing line of the Inid is nothing to do with Inias at all.
It's to do with Ternus' ghost, flitting away to the underworld.
Now, of course, we don't know if that was the final line that a virtual plant for the poem, but it is a fabulous final line because...
When he says in dismay or something, he's actually in indignation in Inid-Innata,
presenting the fact that he's been killed.
But you see, it's quite complicated in this, it's certainly within his rights to kill him for all sorts of reasons he promised.
To Palas' father that he would bring Palas back safe and sound.
And he hasn't done that.
He also may be thinking strategically this fiery, hot-headed prince of the Italians, the Ritulians,
will be a real pain in his side if he does spare him.
On the other hand, he really is tempted to spare him.
And that's a precursor of the role of mercy, as you've mentioned in Roman ideology.
And I have to say that it was a particular policy that was associated with Julius Caesar in civil conflict.
He chose to spare a lot of Romans on the opposite side rather than to kill them and set vendetta's in train.
So even that idea of mercy is highly politicized.
I guess a more tragic reading than you two of that, or ironic, because as you said, the central doctrine laid out in book 6 about sparing the ones who appeal.
And that this is what he should do.
It would be consistent with his character.
And he is persuaded.
Now, two things.
First is, well, is Anias in a rage, not because Ternus killed Palas,
but because he's in a rage really against himself, because he made a promise to Palas' father.
And through his own neglect, actually allowed Palas to die in his first experience on the battlefield, maybe.
And he takes it out.
But more than that, I don't know, can I just have that text?
I want to point to one line, which I think jumped out at me, rereading this,
where Anias stood there lethal in his bronze, his eyes searched the distance.
That's the line.
His eyes searched the distance.
Here we have two warriors, very much like a gladiatorial contest, and they are being looked at.
And here is the one who is standing over, the one he is to be.
And he raises his eyes and he looks around.
He's almost as if he's looking to his Roman audience and trying to get a signal from them,
what they want him to do.
And it's almost as if he sees them, put their thumbs down and say, "Kill him, kill him,"
because of some kind of tragic bloodlust.
I don't know that.
I read it as almost as an idiot doesn't have any choice, because it's the will of the Roman people for this kind of death
and reciprocal violence, and that this idea that will we ever break the cycle of reciprocal violence,
will there ever be a kind of end to this kind of thing?
I find it full of pathos and tragedy.
And so have many readers.
And I'm sure you're aware that you're reading some ideas out there into the text,
which are not actually in the text.
And I would argue, there's really one reason why this is a classic poem,
why we call this a classic poem, why it has an abiding interest for us,
and why so many people have interpreted the poem in so many different ways through the different ages,
because Virgil does not explain why in his is angry.
He's he angry at himself as you suggest, Robert.
It's a plausible hypothesis.
Is he angry because some kind of wave of emotion for or comes over him, which he can't resist?
He's kind of reverting to being like a Homeric warrior, even though he's struggled through this whole epic poem
to become Roman or proto-Roman.
He's struggled to attain Virgil's, but at this last moment it all slips through his fingers.
So it could be example of human fragility and human inconsistency.
The fact is the photo does not spell it out, and that is why I think this poem is a classic because at the end you can read it as you prefer.
You read it, you come to the text.
If you're looking for tragedy in the text, you might find it.
If you're looking, as some have looked for inies acting very justly, there are times,
Aristotle says, when it's right for the good man to get angry.
So maybe this is one of those occasions when it's right for the good man to get angry.
Maybe that's what he's doing.
Virgil is not explicit.
I know he's not, but that's why it's great literature.
Absolutely.
His eyes search the distance.
That, for me, is very telling.
So, Zena, would you mind reading from the Latin so that we can not just interpret,
actually hear what this poem sounds like and this was actually read out loud in the court of Augustus.
Yes, it certainly was.
We should remember that Latin poetry was oral.
It went in through the air, and this is very important.
So I'll read just the last paragraph in the last few lines in English,
and then I'll read a few lines of Latin.
He has stood there lethal in his bronze, his eyes, his eyes search the distance,
and his hand paused on the hill of his sword.
Ternus' words were winning him over, but then his gaze shifted to the fateful bouldery
on his enemies shoulder, and the belt glittered with its familiar metalwork.
The belt of young palace, home Ternus had killed, and who's insignia he now wore as a trophy.
In yes, his eyes drank in this memorial of his own savage grief,
and then burning with fury and terrible in his wrath he said,
"Do you think you can get away from me while wearing the spoils of one of my men?"
"Palace sacrifices you with this stroke.
Palace and makes you pay with your guilty blood."
Saying this and seething with rage,
"In yes, buried his sword in Ternus' chest."
The man's limbs went limp and cold,
and with a moan his soul fled resentfully down to the shades.
And that's in the brand new translation by Stanley Lombardo, which I hadn't seen until half an hour ago.
Okay, the last eight lines of the ined.
"El l'ocul l'is postquam, sai wie, monumenter d'oloris, exu'wie ar's qua'al sit,
for his a'cansus, eir a'teri billis, tonic, spollis, in dutme orum a'eri pia re mihi,
palace, t'ocul n'eri, palace imolat, at poinam scalaratic sanguine sumit."
Hoc t'cans, vera d'wir's susu, pectre con d'it, verwiddus.
"As t'il'is alun tu fricore m'brah,
"We t'a qu'e kum gami t'ul fricit, in d'inata su'b un ras."
Mm-hmm.
It's very significant, I think, that the last word of the ined is "um ras" shades.
The shades in the underworld ghosts the dead from the end of the year.
Well, I'm just hearing that is reason enough to go and learn Latin, no?
I hope so. I hope so.
Okay.
I mean, I made some opening remarks about the relationship between America and Rome.
The kind of, let's say, tragic reading of the book that I've been representing a little bit.
You know, it doesn't have a long tradition, but there's the so-called, we talked about this before coming on air,
the Harvard pessimists that in the '60s, I think also as a direct result of the Vietnam War,
there was a rereading of a virtual that looking at the undercurrent of critique of empire,
of the huge, almost, well, the inordinate and impossible costs of empire,
the suffering of the innocent and the early deaths and all the personal sacrifices that NES himself has to make in order to fulfill his destiny,
which led these readers of the poem to say that the Aniad, far from being a championing,
the greatness of the empire was actually implicitly trying to say that maybe the cost is too high to pay.
Do you have, where do you stand with regard to that tradition, that kind of reading of the book?
Yeah, I don't really agree with it.
So to say so is to swim against the tide somewhat, but I think it's too situated a reading,
I think it is a reading, seeing the emphasis on loss as being overwhelming,
the sense of celebration of peace and civilization that Rome is associated with in the poem.
I think this feeling that the loss is overwhelmed, all the good things,
I think it's an over reading, I think it's too situated in the second half of the 20th century.
And this is really the main era when that reading has been prominent.
Earlier eras have seen the poem as a celebration of empire in a positive way.
It's almost impossible to say that phrase these days.
But while classics and study of Latin literature in particular was so important in educational curricula in Europe,
and then for the founding fathers who, as you said earlier on, were highly educated in Latin and Greek,
what those people were looking to this poem for was role models.
And they were looking to the Roman Republic more generally, but also specifically to this poem.
So they would always be emphasizing the positive aspects of India's personality,
especially his PA task, his sense of religious duty and obligation.
Very difficult word to translate again.
It means that it's a obligation to the gods and to your family and to your nation,
patriotism. It's all of those ideas in a bundle.
So at earlier periods, India was regarded as a role model,
an instantiation of virtue like some of the other big names,
some of the big names from the Roman Republic and era like Cato and Brutus and Cassius,
the assassins of Julius Caesar who were regarded as having acted to restore liberty,
liberty, republican liberty, because they thought that Caesar was becoming a tyrant,
and particularly Cicero of the great Orator and statesman of the late Republic,
he was perhaps the single most important figure for the founding fathers who were modeling themselves on him in all kinds of ways.
So I think there's a lot going for that kind of reading.
On the other hand, I don't want to say that there is no sense of loss and regret in the poem.
Of course there is. It's a balance. It really is a balance.
And one reason I love to read Virgil, he is my favourite Latin author, by the way,
is it's not just for the beauty of the Latin, which is very clear and just wonderful Latin.
But I think Virgil does show an amazing amount of sympathy for all of his characters,
and as we move through the poem, he refocalises what's going on through a number of different eyes.
And I just think that the Harvard School of pessimists have kind of over emphasised the theme of loss at the expense of the celebration of empire
that's definitely there for Virgil. He is enjoying, he's living in an era of peace,
and he's wanted to celebrate that under the new regime of little gustus in all grace.
Yeah. Well, the Harvard pessimists are, you know, that's one tradition,
but I suppose my Virgil came to me through Dante because I began as a Dante scholar at my dissertation on Dante,
the more he were immersed in the divine comedy and the role that Virgil, the way that Dante reads Virgil,
the way he recasts him is very much as a figure of loss.
And as someone who would have been, you know, that he was like the perfect Christian 20 years before the possibility of salvation came around,
and that he was condemned to live in a world of a different concept of Roman virtue in which he was actually not really at home.
So there are precedents for the reading of Virgil as a poet of loss.
That's a very good point. But I would counter I suppose that I think Dante is himself a poet who's kind of very focused on loss and absence.
So it's not surprising to me that he would bring that vision to Virgil, but of course he is definitely responding to something in the poem.
So I have to ask, you know, with the five minutes remaining, the, you know, American, I began with this kind of parallels or suggestions that there might be some weird uncanny correspondence between the destiny of Rome and America.
I mean, is that going too far? Is there a way in which America begins as a republic, basing itself in very consciously as you said, the founding fathers on some notion of the Roman Republic, Cicero, and yeah, there's Greek democracy that's there in the background too.
But I think the precedent of Rome was more important for them than it would than it would than the Greeks were.
And that, are we living in an era right now where many of the contradictions in America have to do with this transitioning process from being a republic to becoming an empire?
Yes, I think that must be right. I think that is right.
And is America represents, when it thinks about Roman history, it thinks of the republic as being all full of good things and modern images of the Roman empire from Augustus onwards are images of, of decadence and bloodletting.
And that's when the gladiatorial games really get going and if one thinks of the movie gladiator, this is obviously set in the empire about 200 years later.
So it would be very, very easy to say, yes, America is in decline right now and sooner or later there's going to be the barbarian invasions or the implosion that given in his great history, the decline of all of the Roman empire talks about as the causes of the end of the Roman empire.
And it's always too easy to see things in terms of decline, but it might be right all the same.
But yeah, for this moment of balancing worldwide control, military control, economic control, at what cost does that come to the human individual?
That is a message you could get out of virtual and apply to modern day America.
Well, one thing I wanted to say about Rome is among the ancient civilizations, I think it's quite exceptional among them in this respect that if you look at the Greeks, they had their notion of being Greeks and then there were the barbarians.
If you look at the Hebrews, there were the Gentiles and the Hebrews, there were us and them.
China, great empire, you know, ancient empire, it built this huge wall around itself in order to say the "Here's the inside and then they're outworld on the outside."
Rome is the only one known to me among the great kind of empires which said, we don't have a distinction.
Rome is a universal concept.
The notion of citizenship applies equally to all people's races, ethnic backgrounds and so forth.
And that equitas, there's a sense that the whole world can now become Rome as it were.
And for a while, that idea did have some reality to back it up.
And I'm wondering whether Rome did really give us our concept of universality, the one that America itself has perhaps inherited.
Yeah.
I think so.
And just to go back to where you began with the dollar bill, a purer bus unum, out of many one.
Maybe that's the idea that we should take away from studying Roman antiquity that you can spread your net over the whole world,
but then you can synthesize and assimilate so that everybody becomes, as you say, a Roman citizen.
So maybe that's an aim. I'm too cynical perhaps to really believe in that because I think there are lots of things wrong with globalization.
I think the destruction of the particular, the local is really terrible.
But maybe that's where the analogy will break down.
Oh for sure.
I think that it's a very noble idea in practice, however, I agree with you that one has to look at all the local cultural differences and that were wiped out really annihilated.
You go around the Mediterranean world or even in Gaul, France, or in England, and you look at all these Roman, the ruins of these Roman cities.
And they're all on the same model. They have the same structure with their axes like this, like that.
Yeah, monolithic buildings.
And don't see all the extraordinary differences of local cultures that were basically eliminated by this imposition of a rigid Roman model.
But of course there's a price to pay for all these things.
And anyway, so we've gotten to the end of our hour and it's been fascinating.
I think that we need another one on Virgil and Rome.
So I hope that we're going to do that sometime soon.
It's been a great pleasure to be here, Robert. Thank you for inviting me.
Thank you very much. I'd like to remind our listeners that coming up, Decca, at the Cafe Bohemian, followed by the Bard.
And after that, it's Port Snack Cap.
But that's it, Morrison.
Let out this screen.
Also, please visit our web page.
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And there you can click on the entitled "Epinions."
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We'll see you next week. Our guest is going to be Joshua Landy.
We're going to be talking about much said post.
Next week. Bye bye.
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