From: adam g (adamg@bu.edu)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 11:27:08 MDT
> [Matt 3] This reminds me, the Aeneid was taught to school children in
ancient Rome as literal history. Now, if anything, the 'history' books of
the Old Testament, like Joshua, Judges, Samuel, etc read a bit more like a
real account (however garbled) of some sort of real events than the Aeneid.
And as for being derivitive, anyone could see even then that as masterful as
Vergil was, much of his material was borrowed from Homer.
>
> [Matt 3] Still, serious people ran a vast empire believing they descended
from gods and goddesses and heros suckled by wolves, etc. (It seems that
having highly implausible ideas of who one descended from or of the history
of one's people does not prevent good sense and pragmatism and technical
advancement in the present.) By comparison, believing in a phantom
enslavement, which could well have been based on real events, though vastly
inflated in the telling of the story for all the reasons that the cruelties
of one's enemies are always inflated, actually seems somewhat reasonable.
[Adam 0]
If I may interject, I'm not aware of the evidence that school children were
taught the Aeneid as literal history. In fact there are reasons I
strenuously doubt this is the case. The grammarians possessed a
well-reticulated system of literary criticism (as Hermit pointed out), based
on reading poetry as fictive, that preserved Roman knowledge into the Dark
Ages. It was not until the Christian Middle Ages that absurdities like the
'sortes Virgilianae', which was a system of fortune-telling based on
flipping to a random verse of the Aeneid, or the spelling 'Virgil', which
was based on its similarity to the mystical 'virga' or wand, cropped up.
These are the sky-hooks that eventually develop from the kind of intensely
literal reading Christians were performing on the Bible and Jews were
performing on the Torah (and I imagine the Haggadah) that eventually sought
cosmic significance in every word. I see a very different case among
literate Romans. Consider Servius' widely-used 4th century commentary on the
Aeneid that <i>begins</i>:
In exponendis auctoribus haec consideranda sunt: poetae vita, titulus
operis, qualitas carminis, scribentis intentio, numerus librorum, ordo
librorum, explanatio...
qualitas carminis patet; nam est metrum heroicum et actus mixtus, ubi et
poeta loquitur et alios inducit loquentes. est autem heroicum quod constat
ex divinis humanisque personis, continens vera cum fictis; nam Aeneam ad
Italiam venisse manifestum est, Venerem vero locutam cum Iove missumve
Mercurium constat esse conpositum. (available from Perseus at
http://www.perseus.org/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0053 )
"In explaining writers these things should be considered: the life of the
poet, the title of the work, the nature of the poem, the author's intent,
the number of the books, the order of the books, and their explanation...
The nature of the poem is obvious; for it is heroic meter and a mixed
performance where both the poet speaks and makes other characters speak.
Moreover it is heroic because it is made from divine and human personages,
which contains both truth and fiction; for it is well-attested that Aeneas
came to Italy, but that Venus truly spoke with Jove or that Mercury was
sent, is well-known (a translation of 'constat' straight from Chambers
Murray) to have been composed."
In other words serious Romans took the Aeneid at face value as a great poem
and witheld the stamp of historicity for the more rigorously researched
genre of historical prose. Poetic use of mythology was in general regarded
with a grain of salt, especially among the more comic of the Latin elegists,
contemporary with Vergil, who freely poked fun at their heritage (Ovid is
particularly irreverent). Propertius openly calls Hades a 'ficta fabula' in
III.5 but conversely he is very willing to exploit the Hades-topos for
literary effect. As for others I can easily imagine Marx's "opiate of the
people" remark coming from Cicero's mouth, though not in a public
declamation. The official priesthood rapidly became a political tool that,
unlike today's moral majority, had little to no ideological agenda. In many
ways the educated Roman approach to religion was pragmatic and modern, a
point I've always found fascinating.
Hope I didn't waste too much space to expand on a small point but I feel it
may be relevant to Virus' overall mission.
Adam
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