As the Moon Climbs

This is one of those days in which I feel like I have so much to talk about, it’s almost overwhelming. Where to begin?

Book IV of the Aeneid covers the rise and fall of the relationship between Dido and Aeneas. As an avid reader of fantasy novels, it’s difficult for me to suspend the suspension of my disbelief and try to read the intervention of the gods as allegory rather than reality. I mean, Eros shows up and works his mojo on Dido, and I’m supposed to say, “Well, that didn’t really happen, it’s just a representation of Dido’s sudden and intense desire for Aeneas.” This gets especially tough when Mercury tells Aeneas in no uncertain terms that he’s been dallying too long and he needs to make with the sailing to Italy already.

We then have what may be the worst breakup scene in the history of literature, and by “worst” I mean Aeneas utterly fails to be James Bond about it–he doesn’t even manage Odysseus-level rhetoric. He starts with the absolutely unpardonable cliché that amounts to “you deserve better than this” and goes downhill from there. And of course, it’s not his fault that the gods have fated him to leave Dido so his descendants can found Rome. But if you try to read it assuming the gods aren’t real, then he is a total ass. I don’t know if there’s another suitably harsh word–cad? knave? heel?–to describe a man who does the horizontal polka with someone for a year and then suddenly gives them the boot.

Of the five people who participated in the class discussion on this topic, three were pro-Dido and two were pro-Aeneas in this situation. Ironically, it was the females (myself included) who were pro-Aeneas, mainly because we were reading the situation literally and were perfectly ready to blame the gods for the whole problem. I am still not wholly sure what to think of that.

Book V was basically a big party for the most part, certainly with some lovely descriptions and exciting moments if you’re the kind of person who likes sporting events. Otherwise you skim it and move on to Book VI, which is the visit to the Underworld. Much more interesting. Allow me to note what interested me, personally:

DANTE RIPS IT OFF BIG TIME.

How did I not know this? I must have read excerpts from the Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno on at least three separate occasions in school. I am not such a poor student that I would have missed it had a teacher mentioned that the Inferno steals liberally from the Aeneid. And yet here I am, absolutely reeling from shock. I’m sure I’ll recover. Someday.

That said, this book was excellent. Some lines that particularly excited me:

The prophetess began, “Born of the blood
of gods and son of Troy’s Anchises, easy–
the way that leads into Avernus: day
and night the door of darkest Dis is open.
But to recall your steps, to rise again
into the upper air: that is the labor;
that is the task.”

It’s easy to die, but hard to come back. Ooh, gives you chills. And one name for the underworld is Avernus or Aornos, which means “birdless”; what a way to describe the place. It is underground, and so without birds. Another image, of Aeneas getting in Charon’s boat:

He clears
the other spirits from the gangways and
long beaches and, meanwhile, admits the massive
Aeneas to the boat, the vessel’s seams
groaning beneath the weight as they let in
marsh water through the chinks.

The boat normally holds insubstantial spirits, so when Aeneas gets in, it starts to leak. Incredible.

And of course Aeneas runs into Dido, who, in case you didn’t know, built herself a funeral pyre and then stabbed herself in the chest on top of it. So she’s in the Underworld when Aeneas gets there. He’s not entirely surprised, given that she said she’d commit suicide if he left, but he cries anyway. The man cries, for goodness’ sake. How the reader could think he was a total jerk for ditching her against his own will, I’m not sure. And while in Book IV she had eight monologues, including after his terrible breakup speech, here he pours his heart out in an apology and she gives him the cold shoulder and leaves. It’s a bit easier to analyze the psychology of such a moment; Aeneas feels guilty, but it’s too late to make amends because Dido is already dead, and so he has to carry the guilt with him until he joins her. Not that she’d take him back, because she found her first husband down in Dis so she’s no longer available. But it’s an extremely poignant moment.

Given that I’ve rambled extensively, I suppose I’ll leave the rest of this underworld journey for another day. But rest assured, I have not exhausted my enthusiasm for this subject.

Today is allegedly Virgil’s birthday, and I celebrated by reading book III of the Aeneid. Unlike the previous book, which primarily consisted of things bleeding or on fire, this one was almost like the Family Circus comics in which little Billy runs all over the place and is trailed by a broken black line to show where he has been. I cannot think of any other book that has so much traveling in so little time, and practically every place is tied to some significant event. “And this is where Aeneas tried to make a little altar from some branches, but the bush started bleeding and turned out to be a murdered Trojan.” “This is where they tried to kill and eat some cattle but the Harpies kept stealing their food and crapping on everything.” Goodness.

The book is almost amusing in that they end up at Delos, one of the sacred shrines of Apollo, and they are told by the booming voice of the god that they need to go back to the land of their “ancient mother” to start a new city. Unfortunately, they don’t know which ancient mother that refers to, and Aeneas’ dad gets it wrong and they end up on Crete. Things seem happy, people get married and start building houses, and then suddenly there’s a plague and one night the household gods wake Aeneas up to say, “Whoops, hey there guy, sorry that last prophecy was a little vague but you are totally not in the right spot. Get your stuff and head for Italy.” To which Aeneas naturally responds, “Where the hell is Italy?” but the gods had gone back to bed. He tells his dad, who says, “Oh yeah, that’s right, there was that other ancient mother who–” but nobody was listening to him anymore. So Aeneas has to get all the people back on the boats and start looking for this Italy place.

That’s how the language of prophecy works: by being vague and potentially confusing, but inevitably right because of its lack of specificity. Tireisias plays that game with Odysseus, mostly by using a lot of conditional statements. And here I thought the language of obfuscation had been invented by politicians…

We had our midterm exam today, which consisted of three sections: one essay, one short answer and seven identification questions. I think I did well on the first two portions, but the ID questions… I wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted out of them. Who are Castor and Polydueces? Er, twin brother Argonauts? What are the Ister and the Eridanus? Um, rivers? We shall see how it all unfolds.

Which leads me to the bigger question of keeping track of large casts of characters. Epic poems tend to drop names a lot, in quantities somewhere between the Old Testament begatting bits and the red carpet at some Hollywood awards banquet. I find it difficult to remember the names of my husband’s relatives, much less the names of obscure and relatively unimportant characters and locations in a poem over 12,000 lines long.

And yet, amazingly, Homer did it. Or the ancient bards, if you’re partial to the “Homer wasn’t real” theory. Such a feat of memorization is practically unheard of in modern culture. I think it’s only getting worse as we become more and more dependent on the Internet; why memorize something when you can look it up anytime on Google? That portion of our brains is going the way of our vestigial tails.

Even so, better our current plight than a forced return to oral traditions, a la Fahrenheit 451. I wanted to be a book-keeper when I was young, but now I am content to hope that such people are never necessary for the preservation of our literary history.

I wasn’t going to actually write about anything today; instead, I was going to share a passage from The Aeneid that I found especially enjoyable (lines 649-750 if you want to find them yourself). Naturally, I had no intention of typing up a hundred lines of poetry, so I turned to my friendly neighborhood search engine, aka The Google, to find an online copy. After a few frustrating minutes, I came to the conclusion that the most widely circulated version is a verse translation by John Dryden. Try as I might, I couldn’t get past the fact that the whole thing was written in rhyming couplets. Heroic couplets, to be precise, which means they’re in iambic pentameter. I don’t have anything against rhymes or meter in general, but after reading a free verse translation, the difference was unsettling to say the least.

Compare:

And Pyrrhus: ‘Carry off these tidings; go
and bring this message to my father, son
of Peleus; and remember, let him know
my sorry doings, how degenerate
is Neoptolemus. Now die.’ This said,
he dragged him to the very altar stone,
with Priam shuddering and slipping in
the blood that streamed from his own son. And Pyrrhus
with his left hand clutched tight the hair of Priam;
his right hand drew his glistening blade, and then
he buried it hilt-high in the king’s side.

And:

“Then Pyrrhus thus: ‘Go thou from me to fate,
And to my father my foul deeds relate.
Now die!’ With that he dragg’d the trembling sire,
Slidd’ring thro’ clotter’d blood and holy mire,
(The mingled paste his murder’d son had made,)
Haul’d from beneath the violated shade,
And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid.
His right hand held his bloody falchion bare,
His left he twisted in his hoary hair;
Then, with a speeding thrust, his heart he found:
The lukewarm blood came rushing thro’ the wound,
And sanguine streams distain’d the sacred ground.

The latter I find, as is probably the intent, to be much more melodramatic, but that makes it less believable somehow. There are a number of grammatical inversions for the sake of keeping with the rhyme scheme, and that distracts as well. What is meant to be a horrifying, violent murder is diluted somehow by the overtness of the craft. It’s the age-old “man behind the curtain” problem; if my attention is drawn to the machinery at work, the emotional effect is reduced.

And this, my friends, is why it is so vital to be selective about the translation one chooses to read. If I’d been chained to Dryden this whole time, I’d probably be hating The Aeneid, and quite wrongfully. It is a fantastic read so far, even if I am only in book II.

Today my professor mentioned that, unlike his predecessors in the epic tradition, Aeneas is more of a modern hero. Instead of individual feats of valor, he is more prone to collective organization and cooperation. I found it interesting that this was allegedly the more modern view, as it seems to me that the individual vs. collective dichotomy is alive and well; neither has trumped the other, and moreover I would be hard pressed to pronounce one as more modern than the other.

For example, take a sports team. The collective is certainly valued, as the group wins or loses as a whole despite the relative performance of its members. At the same time, individual players are singled out for higher salaries and greater fame based on their ability to surpass their peers. I cannot think of a single instance in which an entire team was featured on a Wheaties box or in a Nike commercial.

Another, perhaps more pertinent comparison is the superhero comic. Superman and Batman are iconic figures who, for the most part, operate alone to bring villains to justice. However, even they have found themselves joining teams of heroes as a means of pooling their talents to achieve some goal that would, presumably, surpass each of them individually. A team of lone wolves, to quote an oxymoron. Is the collective superior to the individual? Or, as in the Argonautica, is the collective noteworthy because of the individuals it contains?

One thing is certain so far: Aeneas, unfortunately, is rather boring as a character because he has no discernible flaws. The gods make things hard for him, but he himself doesn’t make the mistakes that cause problems. Luckily, the descriptions of the environment are so beautiful and poetic that they are reason enough to continue reading. But if a modern hero is someone who is kind and good and always does the right thing, well… I’ll take a less modern hero, thank you very much.