In this third part of his ongoing series on the historical uses and abuses of myth, Alexander Woodward, one of our in-house classicists, here addresses the Golden Age of Latin Poetry.
Hello. It’s Woody again, so we’re returning to the series on uses of Myth (you can have another look at part one and part two, if you want a refresher course). This time I’ll be chatting about certain examples from the Golden Age of Latin Poetry. This is the time between the dictatorship of Sulla and the death of Augustus, so 83BCE to 14CE. We’ll be looking at Vergil and Horace, two of the latest writers of the Age and also two of the greatest. The translations in this post are my own, so apologies to any fellow Latinists whom I may have offended.
Vergil’s unfinished masterpiece, the Aeneid, tells the story of the Trojans’ resettling in Italy after the destruction of Troy. Vergil clearly loved him some Homer, the work is filled with allusions to the blind Greek’s works. I think my favourite example comes from the first three words of the work: the famous ‘Arma virumque cano’ ‘I sing of arms and a man’ (Aeneid I.1) which picks up the Iliad’s ‘Mēnin aeide thea’ ‘Sing of wrath, goddess’ (Iliad I.1). The Aeneid is liberally strewn with such things to let the educated Roman know Vergil had done his Homer homework. It’s important to remember, I think, that eight hundred years separated Vergil from Homer, so by the time the Roman was writing his Trojan epic the Greek was at least semi-mythic himself. Allusions to Homer like this are the stylistic equivalent of making a point about how bad a wife someone is by a metaphor about Clytemnestra. Homer was embedded in Classical literary culture like Shakespeare is in ours; he belonged to everyone and skilful reference to him could lend one’s work gravitas.
But, particularly as we’re working in translation, it is the content that is of more interest to us. In certain other versions of the myth (which are lost except for small summaries and quotations by Ancient and Byzantine scholars) Aeneas traded Troy in exchange for the lives of him and his followers. Now, the Aeneid is, as well as being a cracking bit of narrative poetry, a chunk of pro-Augustan propaganda and Vergil puts a lot of effort into identifying Augustus with Aeneas, so this version of the myth does not get mentioned. Vergil has Aeneas fighting bravely in the streets, only stopping when his mother Venus and the ghost of his wife tell him to stop and to go lead people out of the city and take them to a new home out west. This Augustan theme appears again, for example in Aeneas’ wanderings in Book III. Odysseus wandered about the Mediterranean so Vergil the Homer-scholar has Aeneas wander as well, but it is telling that a great many of the places Aeneas visits are also places associated with Augustus’ victory in the Civil Wars. Vergil even has Aeneas set up an offering to the gods at Actium, where Augustus smashed Marc Antony and won the war.
Homeric imitation also gets an Augustan spin in Book VI. Aeneas goes down into the underworld to talk to his father. There he hears a prophecy about the greatness of the people the Trojans will become once they settle in Italy. He also sees a queue of people waiting to be reborn as great Romans. This is a grand departure from the pale shades of the Homeric underworld; the notions the Ancients had of the underworld had evolved under the hands of the philosophers in the intervening years – the concept of an existence before birth comes from Plato, I believe. I hope I’ve given at least some impression of Vergil’s success at turning very Greek source material into a very Roman epic exactly suited to his times.
Next we turn to Horace, a man who turned the very Greek genre of lyric poetry into something really rather Roman. I’m choosing to write about Horace as well in this post for a few reasons. Firstly so I wouldn’t have the space to get side-tracked into a fanboy-ish ramble about Vergil (I proper loves me some Vergil), secondly because Horace is not as well known by the general public as he should be, thirdly because he is the best example I know for illustrating the use of myth as metaphor. We will be looking at his “Odes” or Carmina (“Songs”) in Latin. The Odes are lyric poetry, a genre regarded as “light” and Horace himself tells us that he has no interest in writing on ‘Achilles’ grumbles’ (Odes I.6.6), he’s concerned with ‘parties [and] the battles of young girls against boys’ (Odes I.6.17). To give you some idea of the nature of Horace’s poetry, looking at my notes on the Odes my summaries on about a third of them contains the phrase “forget about it and have a drink”. When Horace does make reference to myth it’s usually as a point of comparison with whatever point about love or life he’s making. When he’s talking about a love-triangle we get told about Paris, Helen and Menelaus. This is a straight comparison used as much to make the poem “more poetic” as anything.
I’ll take a case study to illustrate how clever Horace can be in using myth. In III.37, a poem in which he’s ostensibly saying farewell and good luck to a former lover of his going on a sea voyage with her new man, he makes a comparison with the myth of Zeus stealing Europa while disguised as a bull. This is more complex affair than straight metaphor. At a first glance this telling of the myth is a straightforward case of “yes, the change of locale will be weird, but you’ll be happy”, with the poem ending with Venus saying ‘A section of the world takes its name from you’ (Odes III.27.75/6). This positive look to the future falls flat in context, though. Horace’s retelling of the myth focuses far more on the negatives of Europa’s trip. He describes her fear of the new land in great detail and calls the bull (who in this metaphor is the woman’s new man) ‘deceitful’ (Odes III.27.25). So Horace is using a myth here to be able to express his true feelings on the matter with enough of a proper veneer of decorum and politeness to get away with it.
By Horace’s time (last century BCE) the archaic oral culture that created these myths was already over a thousand years old but he didn’t have any worries about appropriating them for his own use because once a story becomes that imbedded in a culture they belong to everyone.
One hopes you’re well,
Yours,
ADWoodward
