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The Aeneid: Book II - Some musings

This year I will be teaching The Aeneid as the set text for my Latin GCSE class (but only the lines selected by OCR – see title). This is the first time that I have had to study this text properly (my background is not in Classics) and I have spent the first few weeks of my summer holiday translating, researching and musing on the text. I suppose I come at it with ‘naïve eyes’, but I also come at it with ‘English Teacher eyes’ and I have enjoyed seeing significant moments and language that I would hope my English class would pick up if they were to read this text. I have decided to write a few of these down and open myself up to the scrutiny, disagreement and dismissal of the wider internet community to see what they think about my ideas and perhaps what else I could learn before I teach this after the summer break.

Please therefore feel free to tell me what you think.

1) The impotency of Priam

Priam is the king of a captured city. It isn’t just being taken from him by force, but it is going to be burnt to the ground. The inner sanctum of his home has had the doors wrenched off and, in a darkly comic scene, Priam puts on the armour of his youth and picks up a useless sword. The true impotency of Priam’s sword will be seen when Pyrrhus arrives, but in the meantime, there is the brutal truth of Hecuba and her daughters crowding around an altar for safety, knowing full-well that their salvation is not going to be found in the trembling form of Priam’s ‘Prince to the rescue of the damsels in distress’. Priam is in denial regarding his inability to help and protect and in another story with a less tragic ending, we would see Priam having a mid-life crisis as he takes up the arms (symbols) of his youth. But he cannot protect them and Virgil taps into the psyche of machismo when Hecuba talks him out of trying to be a hero – there will be no blaze of glory for Priam - a husband who cannot protect his wife and a father who cannot protect his children. Hecuba suggests that even Hector could not help - a true sign that the father’s strength has waned and perhaps an additional Freudian detail. Hecuba also leads Priam back to the altar and lays him down, as if he is some elderly relative who has wandered off down the street. His impotency is fully realised when his useless spear is so feeble that it cannot penetrate the shield of Pyrrhus.

It is the victor, Pyrrhus, who now controls who lives and who dies and it is his sword and spear that has the strength needed to pass through the flesh of his enemies.

Priam is a spent force and soon all of his children will be dead and, with them, his name. In the ancient world a name was very important – Medea knew this when she killed Jason’s children.

2. Fathers and Sons

In these lines there are some interesting echoes in the relationships between the various fathers and sons that are mentioned. Priam is told that his son Hector could not save them, Polites is killed before his father’s eyes (another death Priam cannot avenge), Priam states that Achilles did not father Pyrrhus, and that he respected Priam (like a father?), Pyrrhus doesn’t say the name of his father and discusses his inferior breeding and of course Aeneas rescues both his son and his father. The father/son dynamic is clearly important, so much so that Priam abandons his wife and daughters at the altar (potentially their only hope of salvation) in order to chastise Pyrrhus for the death of one son. A few lines later we see again the status of women compared to sons when Creusa is left behind by Aeneas and ends up dead. Priam’s anger seems to be almost fiscal in origin – he talks about repayment and payment in full; it is as if sons are a financial asset, which of course, they were. His harsh words ping off Pyrrhus like his spear will off his shield later in the text. Pyrrhus is more than happy to disparage the name and reputation of his own father (Achilles) as he seeks to make a name for himself. This of course is the natural order of this world; the son usurps the father like a strong army beats a weak one; like Greeks defeat Trojans; like Aeneas and his band of refugees beat the Latins. The strong make a name for themselves – the weak die.

However, strength does not always mean death. Aeneas, who of course is the hero of this text, shows this through becoming a father to his father and saving him from the burning city. He also raises Iulus to the position of companion as opposed to child – this world needs fathers (creators) – it is no place for children (or women as it transpires).

3. The two hands

Pyrrhus stabs Priam using his right hand (his left drags him through his own son’s blood – the left hand is always the more sinister of the pair), whereas Aeneas has Iulus’ hand clasped to his right hand. Here we see how things should be - the young being led by the old. In the case of Pyrrhus’ right hand, we see the effects of chaos leading to children killing (surrogate) parents.

Aeneas also tells his father to take the sacred objects in his hand, because he cannot touch them as his is not pure. I feel that this links to the idea that to hold something makes it real – you cannot have an empire without seeing the empire. This is also seen when Aeneas cannot grasp Creusa’s shade – she no longer exists, so it is time for Aeneas to look forward to his new kingdom and perhaps most importantly for a virile leader, a new wife.

4. Priam and Ozymandias

There is a nice echo between Priam’s headless trunk and Ozymandias’ trunkless legs. Time truly is the enemy of ‘great men’.

5. Forlorn Ceres

Aeneas instructs his followers to meet at the temple of forlorn Ceres. Ceres is a good goddess to mention in this situation. Her links to the boom and bust cycles of the seasons seem to chime directly with the rhythms of empires – first they rise and then they fall – a cycle as inevitable as summer into winter.

I would love to hear your thoughts on any of the things I have started to discuss above. Thanks for taking the time to read!

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Creusa: A Death

My name is Creusa

I was left all alone

While my husband rushed off

In order to found Rome

Distressed in the dark

My death was a trade

For the glory of Aeneas

I had to be a shade

In death I supported him

And was bigger than in life

And thus I became a model

Of a good Roman wife

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Was Blake influenced by The Aeneid when he wrote London?

When dealing with a translation it is important to remember that the translator can often place their own readings onto a text and this makes it difficult to attribute exact intention in an analysis like this (unless any of the writers under examination actually state a direct influence). For this reason, it is hard to know whether Robert Fagles (the translator of the version of The Aeneid used in the following comparative analysis) was influenced by Blake or whether Blake was influenced by the Virgil’s Latin. In this piece I shall be referring to Virgil’s poem, but referencing the English translation of Fagles.

In Book VI of his translation of The Aeneid, Fagles writes, “from there they labor along the charted path”; the word ‘chartered’ is synonymous with Blake’s London, “As I wander thro’ each charter’d street, near where the charter’d Thames does flow…”. In Book VI of Virgil’s poem, Aeneas is walking by the river Styx; similarly, Blake is walking by the river Thames in his poem and it seems as if London is Blake’s version of hell and it echoes the Roman vision of the underworld that Aeneas sees in several ways. In Virgil’s Underworld we see a proto-heaven and a proto-hell, so although it would be anachronistic to apply the Christian version of ‘hell’ to The Aeneid, hell is what Blake would have recognised in Virgil’s descriptions of the punishments administered to the criminals, murderers and adulterers in the Underworld.

In London, Blake is walking along the “chartered Thames” and noting the people around him and their misery and this is exactly what Aeneas is doing in Book VI - his Thames is the river Styx.

The similarities continue when we see Blake’s “mind-forged manacles” of London in Virgil’s line, “the Styx... holds them captive”. In addition to this, Aeneas hears “the flank of dragging chains”. The parallels between London and the Underworld seem to grow. Everyone who is in chains is in hell and everyone who is in hell is in chains.

There is also an echo of Blake’s line, “the chimney sweeper’s cry, every blackening church appals” when Virgil writes, “snatched from the breast on that black day that swept them off and drowned them”. It is a loose link, but it resonates nonetheless.

Many of the people Aeneas sees in the Underworld are there because of the, “crimes of the Spartan whore”, an image that could perhaps be linked to the “youthful harlot’s curse” in London. The shades in the Underworld include “throngs of war heroes [who] live apart”, (much like the “hapless soldier” in London) and they are all in the Underworld because of the ‘Palace’ (Troy/Sparta etc.) and therefore, it could be said that their blood “runs down” their walls, like London’s ‘hapless soldier’.

The end of Blake’s poem is its most heart-breaking as he talks about the “new-born infant’s tear” - a very emotive piece of imagery; what is the first thing that Aeneas hears as he begins his journey along the Styx? “A crescendo of wailing, Ghosts of infants weeping, robbed of their share of this sweet life”.

It is by no means conclusive that Virgil influenced Blake or Blake influenced Fagles, but what is clear is that a river is at the centre of their visions of hell and that over the centuries, people’s idea of hell has perhaps, to a large degree, remained constant. Whether Blake meant to link London to the Underworld or not, what is indisputable is that Blake wanted us to see that the city of London was hell on Earth and neither Blake nor Aeneas wanted to remain with the people along the banks for long.

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The link between Orwell and Aristophanes...

Talking animals are with us from the day we are born. A baby’s first book will often have an animal talking the infant through a narrative and the voices of animals are sounds that never leave us. Loquacious animals appear in cartoons, books and movies and they include some of our favourite characters: Mickey Mouse, Aslan, Rocket, Kermit and Howard the Duck, to name just a few. In texts, animals are allowed to behave in ways and say the things that people cannot - they can be naive without being stupid, they can be honest without needing to be wise and they can be political without being... political. George Orwell knew this and so did Aristophanes. Both writers have used talking animals to say what was perhaps unspeakable in their own societies - either because of censorship or because if humans said what the animal characters said, an audience may feel as though they are listening to a sermon rather than a story, which could turn people away from the desired message; and it is those who need politics the most who are the ones least likely to seek it out and most likely to turn away from tub thumping political stories. Orwell recognised this and gave Animal Farm the subtitle A Fairy Story. He used his idealistic animals as an allegory to deal with the heavyweight topics of communism, capitalism, tyranny and totalitarianism. By setting his story on a farm he was able to take away the weight of history and the complications of political theory which would have been present in a ‘human story’. His decision to anthropomorphise the animals allowed him to simply and effectively get to the crux of his argument. In Birds, Aristophanes employed the same methods nearly 2500 years before Orwell. Both Animal Farm and Birds deal with the search for a utopia where ‘a kind of man’ can turn its back on the suffocation of modern life and get back to basics, start again, and focus on what is important. Both texts see an animal world as a place that has the greatest potential for optimism in the minds of the protagonists. Both communes are also founded by a sage-like visionary (Old Major and Peisetairos) who reveals ‘the truth’ about the subservient lives of the animals - a life that in the ‘new worlds’ they will not have to suffer. But neither Cloudcuckooland nor Animal Farm can escape the shadow of man which falls over both Utopias. Both host unwanted visitors determined to mire the new free zones in the shackles of the 'old world' and both have leaders who succumb to the temptations and corruptions of the 'old world', such as money, power and sex. There are lots of differences between the messages of both texts, but it is in the brutal critiques of accepted systems where these writers find the clearest harmony. “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”, written by Squealer (in Animal Farm) topples communism as equally as the the vote between Poseidon, Herakles and Triballus (which Poseidon loses - to a gluttonous bore and an idiot) highlights the shortcomings of democracy (in the opinion of Aristophanes). It certainly helps that animals deliver these blows to the systems - we seem to listen more carefully when an animal speaks.