entry
Aug. 2003 2nd entry on The
Aeneid, Feb 2022 & Mar 2022
Virgil in Naples (1) also see: (2) (3) (4)
on this page below, The Foundation Document of the Roman Empire, parts 1 and 2
| Left, One of Gastave Dore's illustrations for the Divine Comedy shows Virgil guiding Dante into the Inferno at Lake Averno. |
Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 bc), one of the great names in Western literature, is still connected in some slightly bizarre ways to modern-day Naples. For example, if you drive past the Castel dell'Ovo—the Egg Castle off of Santa Lucia and ask yourself why it's called the "egg" castle, the answer is that about a thousand years ago the rumor started that Virgil, a thousand years earlier, had placed an egg in a small container on the premises. If the egg was ever broken, disaster would befall the city. Indeed, egg shells on the castle grounds were enough to cause small-scale disorder among the population of Naples in the Middle Ages!
Another one:
if you drive through the Mergellina
tunnel on your way to Fuorigrotta, you pass within a
stone's throw of a Roman tunnel. It was one of a few
such tunnels, all major feats of engineering at the
time, that the Romans built to get in and out of
Naples. Legend has it that Virgil conjured this one
tunnel into existence by his powers of sorcery. The
Mergellina entrance to the tunnel is now on the
premises of an historical site called "Virgil's Tomb". And,
three, if you wander down to the seaside near Cape
Posillipo, you can see the paltry remains of what,
over the centuries, has been called, The Sorcerer's
House —meaning Virgil.
ancient
bust of Virgil on the premises
of "Virgil's Tomb" in Naples
Sorcerer, you say? Isn't this the person who
wrote The Aeneid? The Bucolics? The
Georgics? Indeed, it is, and he would probably
be amused at his putative powers of legerdemain, all
due, by the way, to the medieval Italian love of
attributing magical ability to the Greats of
Antiquity. But when Virgil was alive, he wasn't yet
Antiquity; he was just great. No magic in great
writing —just hard work.
Virgil was born near Mantua. His father was a prosperous farmer who sent his son off to Rome to study. Virgil returned home to study Greek philosophy and poetry on his own and began to write poetry that came to the notice of Gaius Cilnius Maecenus, a friend and advisor to the young Octavius (later to become "Augustus Caesar"). Maecenas' name has come down to us as a metaphor of "patron of the arts". That reputation has largely to do with his support of Virgil and the other great poet of the age of Augustus, Horace.
Under the patronage
of Maecenas, Virgil published a collection of eclogues,
idyllic poetry, called Bucolica —"The Bucolics,"
in English. As the title implies, they were filled with
a spirit of nostalgia, a longing for a simpler time.
This was understandable when you consider that Virgil
was a young man when Julius Caesar was assassinated, an
event that almost tore Italy apart. That episode,
itself, came on the heels of great unrest during the
previous 50 years in Italy. Rome was not yet the Roman
Empire, and events seemed to be coursing out of control.
Perhaps, indeed, a sensitive young poet might have
thought—in different words, perhaps, than it occurred to
Yeats 2,000 years later—that "the center cannot hold".
There are ten pastoral poems in the Bucolica, one of which contains the secret as to why Virgil was held in such high, magical esteem by Italians in the Middle Ages. It is Eclogue number four, the so-called Messianic Eclogue, in which Virgil predicts a new age of peace for the world, ushered in by the birth of a child:
Come soon, dear child of the
gods, Jupiter's great viceroy!
Come soon—the time is
near—to begin your life illustrious!
Medieval Christian scholars saw this as a prediction of the birth of Christ and, thus, held the poet to have been a "pagan Christian", if you will, one in a position of privilege regarding the divine course of things. No doubt, this is the reason Dante chose Virgil to be his guide through Hell and Purgatory in la Divina Commedia and no doubt why, among all pagan authors, Virgil did not share their fate of centuries of benign and even malign neglect by Christian scholars.
Octavius prevailed, the
empire geared up, and Virgil moved to the Campania, to
Nola, near Naples. Here Virgil wrote the Georgics —
a hymn of praise to the farmer, another bit of nostalgia
about a simpler, happier time, full of hope that the new
emperor, Augustus, would be the beginning of a great
reign of peace. The Georgics are marked by an
extraordinary upbeat ending, one of regeneration and
resurrection, told in the form of an optimistic allegory
of new swarms of honey-bees issuing forth from the
carcasses of sacrificed cattle. Here, at the end of the
last Georgic, is where Virgil makes a famous
reference to Naples:
This was the time when I, Virgil,
nurtured in sweetest
Parthenope, did follow
unknown to fame the pursuits
of peace...
Virgil then set
about immortalizing Augustus. Drawing on the form
of the Greek epic, he sang of Aeneas:
...his fate had made him
fugitive; he was the first
to journey from the
coasts of Troy as far as Italy...
...until he brought a
city into being...
from this have come the
Latin race, the lords
of Alba, and the ramparts
of high Rome...
For Romans of
the day, the Aeneid was the epic summing up of
their history and a statement of their aspirations
—this was to be The Roman Empire. As with the Bucolica
and the Georgics, Virgil chose an earlier
Greek model for his work: the Homeric epic form. Here,
it is interesting to note that all later epic poetry
in the Middle Ages, and even something as late as Paradise
Lost (1667), owes more to Virgil than to Homer.
Until our own Renaissance had rediscovered the Greeks,
knowledge of the works of Homer was sketchy and
anecdotal. No one in Italy could even read classical
Greek in, say, 1400, even if they had had a Greek copy
of The Odyssey, which they didn't.
Those Greek
originals (or, at least, copies of copies) would not
be available for another century and, thus, Latin
translations of Homer were not completed until the
mid-1500s; so, the "epic" tradition, as originally
Greek as it might have been, passed into and through
our Middle Ages and into modern times as "Virgilian"
rather than "Homeric". When Dante sat around with his
friends in 1300 talking about Homer —as he must have
done— he knew about Homer and mythical Troy only
through references in Roman writers, primarily Virgil,
and through the veil of mythology, one much more
impenetrable to him than it is to us today. Homer and
Classical Greece must have seemed to Dante as,
perhaps, tales of Atlantis do to us, today. But
Virgil? The entire Middle Ages knew Virgil. He
was on the bookshelf. They quoted his language;
indeed, they still wrote in Virgil's language, Latin,
though, ironically, it would be Dante, himself, to
desert that language for the vernacular form later to
become known as "Italian".
Important sections
of the Aeneid play out in the area around
Naples. It is no problem at all, today, to walk up to
the height of Posillipo where Virgil must have stood. It
was called Posillipo even then, so named by Greeks
centuries earlier—Pavsillipon, the "place where
unhappiness ends". From there you can look west across
the Bay of Pozzuoli, as Virgil must have done as he
struggled to put into poetry the mythology and events
that were ancient even to him. You see a point of land
that closes the bay at the other end. This is where
Aeneas' comrade, Misenus, master of the sea-horn —the
conch-shell— made "the waves ring" with his music and
challenged the sea-god Triton to musical battle. For his
troubles, he was dashed into the sea and killed by
"jealous Triton". (See image, above,
right: Looking out over the Flegrean Fields to the bay
of Pozzuoli and Cape Miseno.
Click
here for a
much larger
image and
links to
further text.)
Then
...Pious Aeneas
sets up a mighty tomb
above Misenus
bearing his arms, a
trumpet, and an oar;
it stands beneath a lofty
promontory,
now known as Cape Misenus
after him:
it keeps a name that
lasts through all the ages.
"All the ages" is a long time, but at least 2,000 years later, it is still Cape Miseno. Right past Miseno and the end of the bay, Aeneas and his men "glide to the Euboean coast of Cuma"—"Euboean" from the Greek isle of "Evvoia", purported home of those who had founded the city. Here
... you reach the town of Cumae
the sacred lakes, the loud wood of Avernus,
there you will see the frenzied prophetess
deep in her cave of rocks
she charts the fates
... She will unfold for
you...
the wars that are to come
and in what way
you are to face or flee
each crisis...
This, of course, is
where Aeneas has come to get the answer he seeks as to
where and whether the wandering Trojans will be able
to rest. Here is the cave (photo, right) of the
prophetess, the Sibyl of Cuma:
The giant flank of that Euboean
crag
has been dug out into a
cave; a hundred
broad ways lead to that
place, a hundred gates;
as many voices rush from
these...
Then, Aeneas is off to the lake of Avernus to descend into the underworld to seek his father. At the lake still called Lago Averno,
There was a wide-mouthed cavern,
deep and vast
and rugged, sheltered by
a shadowed lake
and darkened groves; such
vapor poured from those
black jaws to heaven's
vault, no bird could fly
above unharmed (for which
the Greeks have called
the place "Aornos" or
"The birdless")...
Here, then,
is Virgil's repetition of the popular etymology that
has Averno as the source of “infernal,” and
even the word “inferior” in the sense of "the bottom
part of"—i.e. the underworld, Hell.
Aeneas finds his father Anchises, who tells him
...that famous Rome will make her
boundaries
as broad as earth itself,
will make her spirit
the equal of Olympus, and
enclose
her seven hills within a
single wall,
rejoicing in her race on
men...
Those lines are the epic justification for what Rome was to become. They were undoubtedly lines that Octavius —Caesar Augustus— wanted to hear, and once Virgil had given him those lines, there was no way that Augustus was going to give them back. It's hard to say which lines Augustus drooled over the most. I'm guessing Book 6 verse CV (in the translation from 1907 by E. Fairfax Taylor. (No, Augustus read it in Latin. Please, come on!)
"See now
thy Romans; thither bend thine
eyes,/ And
Caesar and Iulus' race behold, /
Waiting their
destined advent to the skies./ This,
this is he —long
promised, oft foretold— /
Augustus Caesar.
He the Age of Gold,/God-born
himself, in Latium shall restore,
And rule the
land, that Saturn ruled of old,/ And
spread afar his empire and his
power/
To Garamantian
tribes, and India's distant shore.
Virgil left Naples on a trip to Greece. He took ill and returned, dying in Brindisi in 19 B.C. at the age of 51. He had not finished the Aeneid, and he left instructions for the work to be destroyed. The emperor made sure that did not happen. Augustus entrusted the unfinished work to two of Virgil's friend for editing, and that is the version that passed through the centuries to Dante and to us.
Virgil's remains were returned to Naples and entombed. Whether they are in the exact spot of Virgil's Tomb in Mergellina is irrelevant. As George Sarton says: "...his main creations were the fruits of his life in Campania. What a country to live in for a poet, a country full of natural beauty and glorious remembrances... If one wants to visualize Virgil, it is there that one must seek for him, not in the land of his birth, but in the one that was the nursery of his genius."
And as Virgil, himself, said: he was "nurtured in sweetest Parthenope".
[Passages cited from the Aeneid,
are from The Aeneid of Virgil, a verse
translation by Allen Mandelbaum, A Bantam Classic
Edition, 1981. Translation © 1971 by Allen Mandelbaum.
Passages from The Eclogues or The Georgics are from Virgil,
The Eclogues, The Georgics. The World's
Classics, Oxford University Press, 1983, translation
by C. Day Lewis © 1983.] The Sarton quote at the end
is from his A History of Science, Vol. 2:
Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three
Centuries B.C. 1959. Harvard Univ. Press,
Cambridge.]
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2. added Feb. 2022
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The Aeneid - The
Foundation Document
of the Roman Empire
-part 1
It's good to have a
foundation document, a piece of paper that describes how
and why your nation, indeed maybe
your whole civilization came to be. Of course, the
farther back you go in time, the more the verifiable —or at least plausible —flowers of fact are
overgrown by the weeds of humans turning into pillars of
salt, mortals having children
with immortals, and someone springing full-blown from
someone else's brow. Nevertheless, if you read the first five books of the Bible, you get a
pretty good account of early Jewish history; you read
Homer, you know about ancient
Greece, and if you read The Aeneid, finished in
19 B.C. by Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B.C.)
(right, he wasn't even finished
with it) you have an idea of how and why the Romans
figured it was their turn to rule the world. It may not
even matter if Vergil's (or
Virgil's) tale of what happened to the losers (the
Trojans) even if the fall of Troy is factual or if Homeric stories are a fusion of various tales
of sieges and expeditions by Mycenaean Greeks during the
Bronze Age. There's something
quantum quirky here —we
change history just by thinking about it. That frightens
me.
| The map above shows the Roman Empire in about 300 A.D. Caesar Augustus (63 BC – 14 AD 14) was the first emperor. He is also known as Octavian (born Gaius Octavius in Rome). He reigned from 27 BC until his death. Historians call him one of the most effective leaders in history. His reign laid the foundations of a regime that lasted for nearly 1500 years, through the decline of the Western Roman Empire until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. He called himself Princeps Civitatis (First Citizen) Some historians call him the Father of Italy in that he established in 7 BC the Latin name "Italia" for the whole peninsula, from the figure of Italus, a legendary king of the Oenotrians, an ancient people of Greek origin in Calabria. Italus may be from ἰταλός (italós, "bull") and that may be a cognate of Latin vitulus ("calf"). The Latin vitulus may be from the Indo-European root *wet- meaning "year" (hence, a "yearling", a one-year-old calf). Speakers of ancient Oscan called Italy Víteliú. Want more "maybes"? "Italy" is related to "veal". Vergil wanted to write something the emperor would like. And that he did. |
A lot of digging by the University of
Salento has gone on way down at the bottom of the heel
of the Italian boot to show that
they have indeed pinpointed the place where Aeneas and
his crew of refugees from Troy set foot in Italy. (Note
that all sources separate Sicily
(island) from Italy (mainland). The description of the
landing:
A Translation into English prose by
Anthony S. Kline (b.1947)
from Book III of The Aeneid
"First Achates
proclaims Italy, then my companions / hail Italy with a joyful shout. Then my
father Anchises/
took up a large
bowl, filled it with wine, / and
standing in the high stern, called to the heavens:/
“You gods, lords
of the sea and earth and storms, carry us / onward on a gentle breeze, and breathe on us
with kindness!”/
The wind we
longed-for rises, now as we near, a harbour opens, / and a temple is visible on Minerva’s Height./
My companions
furl the sails and turn the prows to shore. / The harbour is carved in an arc by the eastern
tides:/
its jutting rocks
boil with salt spray, so that it itself is hidden: / towering cliffs extend their arms in a twin
wall, /
and the temple
lies back from the shore."
Vergil thus places
the site of Aeneas' first landing in Italy at Castrum
Minervae (across from Butrint, in Epirus, a region now shared between Greece and Albania).
He mentions the high promontory atop which was a
majestic temple to the
goddess Minerva (Athena in Greek). The team from the Uni
of Salento is quite sure. No one asked me, but I like
it, too.
In the town of Castro they have built a fine
little museum where you see what they have dug up
so far. It is viewable on the "Legends
of Circular Ruins" website here. "Castro" is from Castrum Minervae
(Latin for "Athena's castle").
The Aeneid was written in a time
of great political and social change in Rome. The fall
of the Republic and the last
war of the Roman Republic had torn through society and
shaken many Romans' faith in the "Greatness of
Rome". However, the new
emperor, Augustus Caesar (formerly Octavian),
instituted a new era of prosperity and peace. The Aeneid reflected this. It
depicted the heroic Aeneas as a man devoted and loyal
to his country and its prominence, rather than to his own personal gains. The
Aeneid gave mythic legitimacy to the rule of
Julius Caesar and, by extension, to his adopted son Augustus, by renaming
Aeneas' son, Ascanius to Ilus from Ilium,
meaning Troy —as recalled in Christopher
Marlowe's immortal phrase "Was this the face that
launch'd a thousand ships, /And burnt the
topless towers of Ilium?" That
made Aeneas an ancestor of the
clan Julia, the family of Julius Caesar, and
many other imperial descendants. Virgil laid out exactly what Octavian would
need as Caesar Augustus. Aeneas came from Troy and is
cast as an ancestor of Romulus
and Remus! Aeneas was the first true hero of Rome. Thus,
Virgil foretells the coming of the Roman Empire. It took
him a while to get to Italy (as
you see from the map.) He stopped for a while in Sicily,
then Carthage where he had a love
affair with queen Dido. We read that Latinus, king of
the Latins, then welcomed Aeneas and his band of exiled
Trojans. Their new lives
were now in Latium. Virgil's account ends abruptly, but
he used Aeneas to pave the way for the coming of the Roman Empire.
====================================================================
part 2 - added March 17, 2021
What Happened
to Aenaria?
My favorite English polymath, Richard
Fry, said that the ancient Greeks (thus, the spreaders
of Greek culture beyond the Aegean) had the unique
feature, a mind-set, that their ideas were going to
last, that they were meant to change things. As noted
above, the great loser at Troy, Aeneas, is treated
extensively in Virgil's Aeneid, where he
is cast as an ancestor of Romulus and Remus. He became
the first true hero of Rome. Virgil wrote the life of
Aeneas and about the idea of being active rather than
passive, something that puts me in mind of
O'Shaunessey's "Ode" (1874) where the "music-makers and
dreamers of dreams" are the "movers and shakers of the
world forever". The Greeks knew
they and their idea were going to move and shake the
world.
It doesn't really
matter if the hero's original Greek name Αἰνείας (Aineías)
can be read to mean a "god inhabiting a mortal body" but
it's curious that are no cities named for this first
Roman hero. With no effort I can think of modern cities
named for ancient ones: Naples, Ithaca, Troy,
Alexandria. You mean there was never an
Aenaria, a city named for Aeneas? What? There was? And
still is, but it's underwater? Where? Wow, wait till the
tourists get a load of this.
First,
find the Aragonese Castle on the
island Ischia. It was built on a rock near the island in
474 BC, by Hiero I of Syracuse. Two towers were built to
control enemy fleet movements. The rock was then
occupied by Parthenopeans (the ancient inhabitants of
Naples). In 326 BC the fortress was captured by Romans,
and then again by the Parthenopeans. In 1441 Alfonso V
of Aragon connected the rock to the island with a stone
bridge in place of the earlier wooden one, and fortified
the walls in order to defend the inhabitants against
pirate raids. Today the castle is the most visited
monument on Ischia. You get into the castle through a
tunnel with large openings that let light enter.
We know that centuries earlier Virgil and
the Romans called the area Aenaria. It certainly sounds like a
place named for Aeneas, the Trojan hero, but until
recently we have been warned off that interpretation.
Don't be fooled by the spelling. But now there's an
exhibit at MANN (National Archaeological Museum of
Naples) on recent marine archaeology and the ancient
Roman city of Aenaria! After a few years of intense
marine archaeology, experts tell us that this indeed is
the site of Aenaria, but you can't see it because it's
underwater (some meters blow the surface on the right
side of the image, above right. You can see island of
Capri, far right, on the other side of the Gulf of
Naples) This will take some time, but tourist mini-subs
or glass bottom boats are next, as is a tourist
reception center, an underwater archaeological park, marked
underwater trails for visiting divers and, on the
surface, a civic museum for the landlubbers.
This is the most important archaeological find in
decades. Can the area use more tourism? The answer to
that one always seems to be "yes". It probably won't
detract from the more accessible surface sites such as
Pompeii and Herculaneum. And what of the nearby Baia
underwater park with its own mini-subs? Achtung!
Achtung!
Does this mean open warfare between rival U-Boot tourist
fleets? Man, I hope so.
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