Classics and the Western Canon discussion
Virgil, Aeneid - Revisited
>
Book Eleven
date
newest »
newest »
Camilla is indeed a fascinating character! I love her backstory! As a young girl, she wears tiger skins, and as a baby, she is tossed across rough waters tied to a spear! She is described as a fearsome warrior and kills a great many Trojans at batle, but oddly, she is undone by chasing after a priest in hopes of acquiring his extraordinary gear, his "crocus-yellow" cloak, "tawny gold" brooch, golden seer's helmet, golden bow, and elaborately embroidered tunic. In my translation it says:
(book XI, lines 1064-1066)
". . . she rode on
Through a whole scattered squadron, recklessly,
In a girl's love of finery."
In the end, this fearsome warrior of Diana is betrayed by a momentary "girl's" instinct.
I am not quite sure what to make of it all, but her skills as a warrior are both renowned and respected; that comes across quite clearly in the way Turnus reacts to her and the honor he gives her of calling her co-commander. The poem treats her much as other legendary warriors such as Pallas; like the passage preceding Pallas' downfall, her long list of kills is enumerated prior to her eventual death. She has certainly fought well.
As far as the use of Dido's robes, I agree it's interesting that he uses robes fashioned by her own hands to adorn Pallas for the funeral, especially since her fate was so tragic. He saw her in the underworld, and he knows her anger has not cooled. But I guess at the time these robes were made, they were hand-fashioned with love; maybe he is trying to express his love for Pallas in this way, garbing him in death with clothes so fine as to be handmade by a queen? The symbolism of the action is interesting though given Dido's fate, but I am not certain what Virgil means by it.
In my translation, it appears he uses both of the two robes fashioned by her to adorn Pallas. The first is "wrapped around the prince," and the second, "he spread . . . / Mantling the hair soon to be set aflame."
Greg wrote: "The poem treats her much as other legendary warriors such as Pallas"You're right, Greg. These characters that Virgil shares with us are truly spectacular, deep, and detailed enough to be sufficiently interesting, but are vague enough to leave so much open-ended.
It's stuff like this that makes me think that coming back to Virgil in the future will be truly enjoyable once again!
Kyle wrote: "Greg wrote: "It's stuff like this that makes me think that coming back to Virgil in the future will be truly enjoyable once again"Thanks Kyle, and I agree! I can definitely see myself re-reading this someday!
Greg wrote: "but oddly, she is undone by chasing after a priest in hopes of acquiring his extraordinary gear, his "crocus-yellow" cloak, "tawny gold" brooch, golden seer's helmet, golden bow, and elaborately embroidered tunic. ."This is an interesting point. Euryalus is undone the same way when he plunders his victims. It makes me wonder what Virgil's thoughts were on material wealth. Aeneas flees Troy with the clothes (and his father) on his back, but he manages to remain wealthy without having to earn or steal it.
Greg wrote: "But I guess at the time these robes were made, they were hand-fashioned with love; maybe he is trying to express his love for Pallas in this way, garbing him in death with clothes so fine as to be handmade by a queen? ."I was wondering if maybe the robes were originally made for Aeneas and Ascanius. The fact that he gives one away to Pallas, to memorialize him, is meaningful if that's the case. But what about Dido's curse? At another point Aeneas gives away a bowl that was a gift from Dido and I thought the same thing. Would you want a gift that came from a person who cursed the person giving it to you?
Thomas wrote: "Greg wrote: "But I guess at the time these robes were made, they were hand-fashioned with love; maybe he is trying to express his love for Pallas in this way, garbing him in death with clothes so f...""Maybe he doesn't want Lavinia to know he kept anything from Dido. (tongue in cheek).
Donnally wrote: "Maybe he doesn't want Lavinia to know he kept anything from Dido. (tongue in cheek)":)
Thomas wrote: "I was wondering if maybe the robes were originally made for Aeneas and Ascanius. The fact that he gives one away to Pallas, to memorialize him, is meaningful if that's the case. But what about Dido's curse? At another point Aeneas gives away a bowl that was a gift from Dido and I thought the same thing. Would you want a gift that came from a person who cursed the person giving it to you?"Personally, I don't know if I would be happy to receive a re-gift associated with a curse like that. :)
I wonder about something though Thomas. In the Fitzgerald translation, I'm reading it as saying Aeneas used both robes for Pallas' funeral rites, the first to wrap the body and the second to mantle the hair. But maybe my translation isn't accurate, or maybe I'm just not reading it correctly?
(lines 96-103)
"Aeneas brought two robes all stiff with gold
Embroidery and purple. Dido of Sidon
Herself had loved the toil of making these
With her own hands . . . . One
of these the sorrowing man wrapped around the prince
In final honor, and he spread the other,
Mantling the hair soon to be set aflame."
Of course, it's not a big deal if he used either one or both of the robes in this way, but I was just curious if there was a difference in translation here. When I read Seamus Heaney's and Robert Fitzgerald's translations side by side in book 6, I was surprised at some of the differences.
Greg wrote: "I wonder about something though Thomas. In the Fitzgerald translation, I'm reading it as saying Aeneas used both robes for Pallas' funeral rites, the first to wrap the body and the second to mantle the hair. But maybe my translation isn't accurate, or maybe I'm just not reading it correctly?"It sounds like most translations follow suit with Fitzgerald, but it isn't strictly literal. The "one" is in the Latin, but I don't see "the other" -- my Latin is barely functional, but I don't see "the other."
Virgil's Latin is incredibly compact though, so English translations have to expand and interpolate in order to make sense. I found this note on the Perseus site:
77] Serv. and the commentators generally understand Virg. to mean that one of the two robes is used to wrap the body, the other is a hood for the head. They may be right; but the language in this case is highly artificial; and a simpler explanation would be that he chooses one of two robes, and in it wraps the body so as to cover the head. In Il. 24. 580 two φάρεα are reserved to wrap the body of Hector.
Aeneas wears one of Dido's robes in Book 4 -- my first thought was of Medea, who poisons Creusa with a dress. (Jason abandoned his wife Medea for Creusa, the daughter of Creon... In some versions the dress is cursed and bursts into flame when Creusa puts it on, in others it is laced with poison.) I suspect we are meant to hear some echoes of the Medea tale in Virgil's story.
Thomas wrote: "It sounds like most translations follow suit with Fitzgerald, but it isn't strictly literal. The "one" is in the Latin, but I don't see "the other" -- my Latin is barely "Thanks Thomas!
That's very helpful, and the idea of a reference to the dress in Medea is interesting too.
Thomas wrote: Aeneas flees Troy with the clothes (and his father) on his back, but he manages to remain wealthy without having to earn or steal it. There is the alternate telling of the tale in which Aeneas is given a subversive role. The wealth he displays, including the abundant prizes he gives out in the games, comes from the bribe he received for betraying Troy, letting the horse be pulled into the castle. (Oh Horrors! Aeneas Bad?) I'd like to find the alternative version but have not.
Sam - I did a little research and I think we have an obscure Greek historian named Menecrates to thank for Impius Aeneas:
https://www.romaoptima.com/roman-empi...
https://grbs.library.duke.edu/article...
I followed that thread for a little while. As a follower of "revisionist" historians, I would not dismiss it out of hand. Virgil's going way over the top to praise Aeneas does suggest some counter-current. To watch our own current events and proclamations one might even feel it is worth more strenuous pursuit. That would be for classical scholars, not me.This brings to mind my likely naive question of just how did Virgil write? Not pencil and paper. Not chisel and stone. Parchment and quill with ink? In what form did "we" get it?
Is The Aeneid perhaps part of the archaic legacy we erroneously assign to direct transmission from the Greek or Latin, when they actually entered The Western Canon during the early Renaissance from the Arabic culture, like Al-Jabira or Euclid? (Probably I have muddied my question by conflating original contemporaneous things like Algebra with translations like Euclid or Galen.)
Sam wrote: "This brings to mind my likely naive question of just how did Virgil write? Not pencil and paper. Not chisel and stone. Parchment and quill with ink? In what form did "we" get it?"Papyrus, more than likely. It would have been copied and re-copied for three or four centuries until parchment became more widely used. Because it was copied by hand, there are slight variations due to scribal errors, and it has been the job of scholars to sort out those errors. Luckily there are more ancient manuscripts (some fragmentary) of the Aeneid than any other book except the Bible, which makes it easier to sort out the errors.
Virgil has always been enormously popular so I suspect that even if it was studied by Arabic scholars (and I'm not sure about that) it didn't need to be preserved by them. Of all the surviving ancient Latin papyri, Virgil appears on over half of them. And the fact that Virgil was "Christianized" and treasured as the central Latin text throughout the Middle Ages protected him pretty well for the future.
So it would have been communicated orally to his contemporaries? And only to the small population of the elite?
No, it was written down by Virgil, most likely on papyrus. Most sources say that he was from an equestrian family and had a formal education. By the time he wrote Aeneid he was already a well known poet, so the literate class most likely came to know it quickly. How quickly the non-literate classes came to hear, I'm not sure.
Sam wrote: "I followed that thread for a little while. As a follower of "revisionist" historians, I would not dismiss it out of hand. Virgil's going way over the top to praise Aeneas does suggest some counter-..."Sam, that is a very interesting question. Apparently, we do not have an "original" text but actually different versions that survived. Scholars try to study such versions and find which would be the closest to Virgil's. My version, for instance, is based on a latin one, compiled by Frédéric Plessis and Paul Lejay for Hachette editors in 1919. Do you know which latin version your book used, for instance?
Yeah, I am picturing Virgil at a rolltop desk with a quill pen and a scroll. Can't make it work. Were there Romans with copied scrolls sitting in armchairs reading? Guess I am too middle-class to imagine being a Roman in Rome in 100 BCE. I am reading both Shadi Bartsch and Sarah Ruden. I'll need to read the foreword to find their sources. But I think even then there is New Latin and Old Latin, so there is a regression of Latin sources too.
I forgot the main one, hearing a troubadour reciting the poem directly from a source. Would Virgil have a poetry reading at, say, Cafe Romano, a table on the patio between the columns? What about an oration in The Forum? Etc.
We've seen that Aeneas is a warrior of heroic proportions, but do we learn anything more about him by the way he mourns? Some of the details of the ceremony are curious -- Aeneas dresses Pallas in one of two robes made by Dido. Is this significant? (And how about the other one?)
Before granting a truce so that both sides may gather the bodies of their fallen comrades, Aeneas blames Turnus for the war:
You plead for peace. I'd give it to the living!
I only claim the home fate grants me here.
It's not your people but your king I'm fighting,
Who broke our guest bond, trusting Turnus' weapons --
It ought to have been Turnus facing death.
Aiming to fight this out and drive the Trojans
Away, he should have met me hand to hand.
This raises the question of who, or what, is finally responsible for the war. The answer is complicated. Is it Aeneas because he is effectively colonizing a part of Italy and taking a wife intended for another? Is it Turnus because he won't accept that Aeneas and the Trojans are fated to start again in Italy? Is it Juno for making Turnus furious? Virgil at one point even blames Lavinia, who doesn't even have a voice in his story.
The Latins send envoys to Diomedes to see if he will help. He asks them to look at the costs of the Trojan war, which he lists, and suggests they find a way to make peace. Latinus agrees, and so does Drances, because after all, their best fighter chose to run away during the height of the battle. Turnus is of course livid at this and says they should never surrender. They still have powerful allies, including Camilla, and if Aeneas wants to decide the matter in single combat, he's willing.
Camilla the Volscian is one of the most interesting and unexpected characters in the book. Like Dido, she commands, but she plays a far different kind of role. What is her role in the context of the war and the poem?