Table Of Content
Virgil's
Aeneid
EditedandwithanintroductionbyHaroldBloom
SterlingProfessoroftheHumanitiesYaleUniversity
©19871
ISBN0877549192
Contents
Editor'sNote/vii
Introduction/1HAROLDBLOOM
Aeneas/9
VIKTORPOSCHL
Virgil'sStyle/31THOMASGREENE
TheTwoVoicesofVirgil'sAeneid/57ADAMPARRY
DepthsandSurfaces/75W.R.JOHNSON
TheDidoEpisode/103BARBARAJ.BONO
WarandPeace/127K.W.GRANSDEN
Chronology/149
Contributors/151
Bibliography/153
Acknowledgments/155
Index/157
Editor'sNote
This book brings together a representative selection of the most useful criticism available of
Virgil's Aeneid. The critical essays are arranged here in the chronological order of their original
publication.IamgratefultoMarenaFisherforheraidineditingthisvolume.
MyintroductionmeditatesuponVirgil'spoeticoriginality,whichIseeascenteredinhispeculiar
gift of negative imagination. The chronological sequence begins with Viktor Poschl, who sees
the hero Aeneas "as a man of memory and of inner vision." Thomas Greene, studying Virgil's
style, emphasizes "the moral ambivalence which personality entails" throughout the Aeneid.
Greene'sinsightsare cognatewithAdam Parry's distinction betweenthe poem'stwo dominant
voices,Augustanandelegiac.
W R. Johnson, whose Darkness Visible may be the best critical study of Virgil, studies the
contrast between the poem's surfaces, which shine with bright images of illusion, and its
depths, which figure the terrible reality of the will of Juno. In an exegesis of the Dido episode,
Barbara J.Bonoseesitasexposingan intensityof longingfora spiritual vision morecomforting
thananyVirgilcouldhopetoknow.
In this book's final essay, K. W Gransden insists that "for Virgil all war is mad and one cannot
conduct oneselfmorallyonthebattlefield."Gransden,likeJohnsonandBono,takesusbackfull
circleto this book's introduction, itselfheavilyinfluenced byJohnson,and to ourcontemporary
view of Virgil as an ancestor of our nightmare discontents, our nostalgias, and our fitful hopes
forwhatyetmightbe.
Introduction
When Aeneas is sent by Virgil to the shades, he meets Dido the Queen of Carthage, whom his
perfidyhadhurriedtothegrave; heaccostsher withtendernessandexcuses;butthelady turns
awaylikeAjaxinmutedisdain.SheturnsawaylikeAjax,butsheresembleshiminnoneofthose
qualitieswhichgiveeitherdignityorproprietytosilence.Shemight,withoutanydeparturefrom
the tenour of her conduct,have burst out like other injured women into clamour,reproach,and
denunciation; but Virgil had his imagination full of Ajax, and therefore could not prevail on
himselftoteachDidoanyothermodeofresentment.
—DR.SAMUELJOHNSON,TheRambler,no.121
I
To be employed as the key instance of "the dangers of imitation" by the greatest Western
literary critic is the saddest of all Virgil's melancholy-ridden posthumous vicissitudes. It is
unhappy enough that the excessively noble Aeneas should be considered by many readers to
be a prig,a Trojan version of George Eliot's DanielDeronda, as it were. But to read Virgilwhile
keepingHomertoosteadilyin mind isclearlytoimposeupon thestrongestLatinpoetaburden
that only a few Western writers could sustain. Virgil is not Dante or Shakespeare, Tolstoy or
Joyce. He has his affinities with Tennyson, and with other poets in the elegiac mode, down to
Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, both of whom celebrated Virgil as a beautiful "inadequacy"
(Arnold) and a mature "poet of unique destiny" (Eliot), two apparently antithetical judgments
that actually say much the same thing,which is not much. Like Arnold and Eliot,poor Virgilhas
becomethepoetofprofessors,manyofwhompraiseVirgilasasplendidrevisionistofHomer,a
verydifferentviewfromDr.Johnson's.
OtherclassicistshavegivenusamoreTennysonianVirgil,aknowinglatecomerinfatuated"with
twilight moods,with blurred images,with haunted,half-enacted interviews and confrontations
that disintegrate before our eyes just as we begin to perceive them." I quote from Darkness
VisiblebyWR.Johnson,thebeststudyofVirgilthatIhave
read, and hasten to add that Johnson is eloquently summing up the judgment of other critics,
rather than stating his own, which seems to me more persuasive. W R. Johnson's Virgil is
marked by a "vast Epicurean sensitivity to pain and suffering," and is not concerned so much
"about winning battles but about losing them and learning how to lose them." This Virgil has
the "imagination of darkness" and has "discovered and revealed the perennial shape of what
trulydestroysus."
In some sense, W R. Johnson moves the fantastic and menacing figure of Virgil's Juno to the
center of the epic, which is certainly a useful corrective to many previous readings of Virgil.
Juno is Virgil's most ambiguous achievement, and doubtless is one of the major Western
representations of what contemporary feminist critics like to call the projection of male
hysteria.IwouldprefertonameVirgil'sJunoasthemaledreadthatoriginandendwillturnout
to be one. We do not judge Nietzsche to be hysterical when he warns us, in his Genealogy of
Morals, that origin and end, for the sake of life, must be kept apart. Despite his
all-too-frequently deconstructed dislike of women (so amiable, compared to his master
Schopenhauer's),Nietzscheishardlyto bedismissedaswhatfeministsliketocalla "patriarchal
critic" (are there any? could there be?). What Nietzsche suggests, as Freud does after him, is
thatallWesternimagesareeitheroriginorend,exceptforthetropeofthefather.
It is frightening that the only Western image that is neither origin nor end is, in Virgil, reduced
tothepatheticfigureofAnchises,whohastobecarriedoutofburningTroyupontheshoulders
of his pious son, the drearily heroic Aeneas. The image of the mother in the poem is somehow
not that of the merely actual mother, Venus, but rather the hardly maternal Juno, who is truly
oneofthegreatnightmareimagesinWestern literarytradition.Virgilisrightlywaryof her,and
ifwereadclosely,soarewe:
O hateful race, and fate of the Phrygians Pitted against my own. Could they be killed On the
Sigean battlefield? When beaten, Could they be beaten? Troy on fire, did Troy Consume her
men?Amidthespears,amid
The flames, they found a way. I must, for my part, Think my powers by this time tired out,
Supine,orsleeping,surfeitedonhate?Well,whentheywereejectedfromtheircountry
Ihadthetemerityastheirenemy
To dog them, fight them, over the whole sea, These refugees. The strength of sea and sky Has
been poured out against these Teucrians. What were the Syretës worth to me, or Scylla, What
was huge Charybdis worth? By Tiber's Longed-for bed they now lay out their town, Unworried
bydeepwater or byme.Marshad thepowerto killthegiant race OfLapiths,andthe Father of
Gods himself Gave up old Cab/don to Diana's wrath: And what great sin brought Cálydon or
Lapiths Justice so rough? How differently with me, The great consort of Jove, who nerved
myself To leave no risk unventured, lent myself To every indignity. I am defeated And by
Aeneas. Well, if my powers fallshort,I need not falter over asking help Wherever help may lie.
If I can sway No heavenly hearts I'll rouse the world below. It will not be permitted me—so be
it— To keep the man from rule in Italy; By changeless fate Lavinia waits, his bride. And yet to
drag it out, to pile delay Upon delay in these great matters—that I can do: to destroy both
countries' people, That I can do. Let father and son-in-law Unite at that cost to their own! In
blood, Trojan and Latin, comes your dowry, girl; Bridesmaid Bellona waits now to attend you.
Hecuba's not the only one who carried A burning brand within her and bore a son Whose
marriagefiredacity.SoitisWith Venus'child,aParisonceagain,AfuneraltorchagainforTroy
reborn!
(7.295-326,Fitzgeraldtranslation)
There is certainly a dark sense in which Juno is Virgil's pragmatic Muse, as it were, the driving
force of his poem. She represents, in this passage, Virgil's authentic if repressed aggressivity
towardshisdaunting
father, Homer. As the inspiration of an agonistic intensity, she necessarily speaks for Virgil
himselfwhenheconfrontstheIliadandtheOdyssey:
Well, if my powers fall short, I need not falter over asking help Wherever help may lie. If I can
swayNoheavenlyheartsI'llrousetheworldbelow.
Is not that Virgil's actual achievement as compared to Homer's? Juno, though she is a
nightmare,isVirgil'sownnightmare,hisdarkcreation,a "darknessvisible" inthegreatMiltonic
phrasethatWR.Johnson choseastitle for hisstudyoftheAeneid.What Virgilmostpowerfully
and originally gives us might be called the creatures of Juno: Allecto and the Dira (though
technically the Dira is sent by Jupiter). Virgilian invention, though deprecated by Dr. Samuel
Johnson, is marked by a negative exuberance that cannot have pleased the author of Rasselas,
whorightlyhadhispositiveimaginationfullofHomer,andnecessarilyfearedhisowndarkside.
II
It is no fresh oddity for a poet to become the official representative of the sensibility and
ideology of an age,while actually producing work of morbid splendor and equivocal pathology.
Virgil's double fate is precisely prophetic of Tennyson's and T. S. Eliot's. Walt Whitman, belat-
edly accepted as our national bard, would be a parallel figure if his poetry had received wide
contemporary acceptance in post-Civil War America, as would Hart Crane, had he been
acclaimedinthedaysoftheDepression.
This phenomenon is now over, since our era is overtly paranoid in its sensibility. The best
writers in contemporary America—John Ashbery, Thomas Pynchon, James Merrill—are truly
representative of the dumbfoundering abyss between the private, aesthetic sensibility and the
public sphere of Ronald Reagan. The abyss was as great between Virgil and the Emperor
Augustus, but both chose to believe and act otherwise. A vision of President Reagan placing
ThomasPynchonunderhispatronageisnotwithoutitscharm.
Virgil, as Dante's precursor, became for Western literary tradition a kind of proto-Christian
poet.Hecanhardlybeblamedforthis,thoughperhapsAeneascan,sinceAeneasunfortunately
issometimespropheticofthatcivicideal,theVictorianChristiangentleman,Gladstone,say,
rather than the exotic Christian Jew, Disraeli. However, Aeneas (though replete with noble
sentiments) actually behaves like a cad towards Dido, and finally like a brute towards Turnus.
Though no Achilles,Aeneas pragmatically is quite frightening,and really about as benign as the
Emperor Augustus, his contemporary model. Machiavelli is more in the line of Aeneas than of
Virgil.PerhapsthegreateststrengthandlastingpuzzleofthepoemisVirgil'srelationtohisown
hero. Does Virgil, like most of us,prefer Turnus to Aeneas? He was not writing the Turneid, but
wouldhehavebeenhappierdoingso?
The violent nature of Turnus, at once neurotic and attractive, has about it the aura of a Latin
Hotspur, though Turnus lacks Hotspur's antic wit. But then Hotspur exists in a cosmos
ultimatelycentered,not upon BolingbroketheusurperandPrinceHal,butuponFalstaff,legit-.
imate monarch of wit. Virgil is not exactly a humorous writer, and I suspect that, if he was in
lovewithany of hisown charactersin thepoem, itwaswithTurnus,ratherthanDido,letalone
Aeneas. The dreadful death of Turnus, which causes the poem to break off, in some sense is
alsothedeathofVirgil,oratleastofVirgil'spoetry:
The man brought down, brought low, lifted his eyes And held his right hand out to make his
plea:
"Clearly I have earned this, and I ask no quarter. Make the most of your good fortune here. If
youcanfeelafather'sgrief—andyou,too,HadsuchafatherinAnchises—thenLetmebespeak
yourmercyforoldageInDaunus,andreturnme,ormybody,Stripped,ifyouwill,oflife,tomy
own kin. You have defeated me. The Ausonians Have seen me in defeat, spreading my hands.
Laviniaisyourbride.ButgonofurtherOutofhatred."
Fierce under arms, Aeneas Looked to and fro, and towered, and stayed his hand Upon the
sword-hilt. Moment by moment now What Turnus said began to bring him round From
indecision.ThentohisglanceappearedTheaccurstswordbeltsurmountingTurnus'shoulder,
