John M. Jeep and Zara Martirosova Torlone

Viacheslav Ivanov’s Vergils Historiosophie: Background, Translation, and Commentary

Viacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949) is mostly known in the West as a major poet and most influential theoretician of the Russian Symbolist movement, who played a central role in Russian literary history of his time. Ivanov's influence on the generations of writers certainly transcended the limits of the brief Symbolist movement. Furthermore, Ivanov's intimidating erudition, philosophy, and poetics were conditioned by his life-long study of classical antiquity, which manifested in all of his writings. The present study pursues three goals: to translate for the first time into English Ivanov's challenging and important essay on Vergil; to contextualize it within Ivanov's overall system of beliefs and philosophy; and to offer a detailed commentary that clarifies numerous classical and other references Ivanov makes while construing his reception of Vergil.

As Vasilii Rudich aptly observed, Ivanov “was regarded by many, with a mixture of bewilderment and admiration, as the Hellenic spirit incarnate” (Rudich 1986, 275).  Ivanov began his study of ancient Greek and Latin on his own at the age of twelve. After graduating from a classical gymnasium in Moscow with highest honors, Ivanov immediately attracted the attention of his professors after he entered the Historical-Philological Faculty of Moscow University, where he made an impression with his impeccable knowledge of ancient languages. Recognizing his great promise as a scholar, in 1886 Ivanov's teachers arranged for him to study at the University of Berlin in the seminar of the famous Theodor Mommsen, who was also pleased by the diligence and promise of his new Russian student. Under the tutelage of Theodor Mommsen and Otto Hirschfeld, Ivanov wrote a Latin dissertation  “On the Tax-Farming Companies of the Roman People” (“De societatibus vectigalium publicorum populi Romani”), which he completed in 1895 but published only fifteen years later, in 1910. Although the thesis was undertaken in the spirit of Mommsen's Römisches Staatsrecht (“Roman Constitutional Law”)  and in accordance with his teacher's methodology, Ivanov's conclusions ran counter to Mommsen's own theory (Rudich 1986, 276). [1] Ivanov's thesis was, however, well received by Mommsen and highly praised by Hirschfeld, who both acknowldged their young student's outstanding achivements (Wachtel 1994, 360).[2] Ivanov chose not to pursue the academic career opening for him in Germany. His early work, however, “gave impetus to the early work of Mikhail Rostovtzeff,” another famous classicist from Russia (Rudich 1986, 277).

Ivanov's disinclination to study Roman history further was probably due to his inability “to identify himself with the Roman spirit” because of its imperial ideals and aspirations  (Rudich 1986, 278). During his dissertation years Ivanov immersed himself at first into the study of origins of Roman belief in Rome's high historical misssion. That study, as we will see, is directly connected with his reception of Vergil. At that time, however, under the influence of Nietzsche, Ivanov's interests shifted from Rome to the study of Dionysiac religion, which became his main interest. His work, The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God (Эллинская религия страдающего Бога), written in 1903-1905, and his second book, Dionysus and Predionysianism (Дионис и прадионисийство), published in Baku in 1923, are both sophisticated and complex works in which Ivanov displays his life-long drive to reconcile the disparate elements of his world-view, mainly classics and Christianity. Ivanov’s drive to construct a syncretic view of paganism and Christianity was by no means a new one. As Pamela Davidson observed, “in post-Renaissance humanist culture” the tension that existed for St. Jerome and St. Augustine and “the line of demarcation, drawn by Dante, who firmly excluded pagans from the sphere of Christian revelation,” became considerably blurred. Russia at the turn of the century was also characterized by “an all-embracing tendency towards cultural syncretism” (Davidson 1996a, 85-6).

The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God was not strictly speaking a scholarly book but rather a course of lectures Ivanov developed and delivered in Paris in 1903. In these lectures, Ivanov argued that Dionysus must be seen as “prototype or forerunner of Christ” and that the cult of the pagan god “offered a certain method of psychological parallel to that of Jesus” (Davidson 1996a, 86). These ideas found their deeper development in Ivanov’s Dionysus and Predionysianism which reflects in more detail Ivanov’s religious and philosophical quest and contains traces of such influences as Nietzsche, E. Rohde, U. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, G. Murray, and E. Dodds (Westbroek 2007). [3]  

The greatest names of Latin literature – Catullus, Propertius, Seneca, Tacitus, or Juvenal – hardly ever entered Ivanov’s poetics, whose focus on the cult of Dionysus and its connection with Christianity remained a persistent preoccupation (Rudich 1988, 132). The only exception was Vergil.  For this reason his essay on Vergil is especially important. “Vergils Historiosophie” was written in German and published in 1931 in a prestigious literary journal Corona, edited and published at that time in Zurich and Munich by Martin Bodmer and Herbert Steiner (Davidson 1996b,  xxxix ). [4]

The core concept for understanding Ivanov’s reception of Vergil is Ivanov’s view of ancient Rome not as a phenomenon of “natural” impromptu culture but as a historical and cultural context for Christianity. As one can see, Ivanov’s reception of Vergil in that respect does not differ from his view of the Dionysiac cult. Ivanov is consistent in his attempt to include the most influential pagan legacy into his Christian world-view. In this light Ivanov’s move to Rome in 1924 and conversion to Catholicism in 1926 contributed to and even enforced this tendency. [5] Rome and Latinitas existed for Ivanov as an embodiment of what he termed the “Hellenic Principle” (эллинство) identified with Mediterranean and European culture and rooted in “the blood and language of the Latin tribes” (Myers 1992, 86). [6]   Rome for Ivanov was a perfect locale that embodied two of his spiritual passions, not as a utopian fantasy, but as a geographical city in which pagan shrines and the Hellenic spirit existed side by side with Christian churches, and the pagan past was neither disturbed nor annihilated by the advent of a new religion.  For Ivanov there existed a miraculous, uninterrupted continuity that stretched from the Dionysiac mysticism through Vergil and to the Christian Dante. 

Ivanov’s continuous allusions to Dante in the following essay are full, as Pamela Davidson observed, of several “intellectual inconsistencies.” Ivanov viewed Dante as poet, “whose spiritual outlook exhibited Dionysiac traits” and as such can be used as yet another proof that the Dionysiac religion is “prefiguration of the ideal, primitive essence of Christianity” (Davidson 1989, 43). However, as in the case with Ivanov’s reception of Vergil, one must not look for the reflection of the historical Dante and his attitudes to pagan antiquity in Ivanov’s essay. Ivanov was interested in Dante “as a vehicle which he could invest with his projected spiritual ideal of a synthesis of Greek and Christian mysticism” (Davidson 1989, 46). The same approach is at the core of his reception of Vergil, whom Ivanov in a very decisive way read through the lens of mysticism and Christian belief. Furthermore, as Vasilii Rudich pointed out, Ivanov’s reception of the Aeneid was connected with Ivanov’s theory of antiroia (the reverse flow), the flow of causality, directed from future to past (Rudich 2002, 35). [7] In Ivanov’s view the Christian beliefs and texts illuminate the poetry of the pagan past.

While the influence of classical scholars and German philosophers was the most formative for the development of Ivanov’s ideas, it seems appropriate to say here few words about the influence of Vladimir Solov’ev on Ivanov’s philosophy, especially his view of Vergil. During the decade of the 1880s Solov’ev became occupied with idea of “theocratic utopia” (Zenkovsky 1953, 476). The most significant book focusing that idea was “The History and Future of Theocracy” (1885-87), which is greatly concerned with the reunification of the divine and the human after a prolonged period of alienation between God and man. In the spring and summer of 1887 Solov’ev and his friend, the poet Afanasii Fet, worked on Russian translation of the Aeneid, which for Solov’ev appeared to be the perfect embodiment of the idea of unity between the human and the divine. Furthermore as it follows from Solov’ev’s letter to Nikolai Strakhov, the former also sees Aeneas as an ancestor of Christianity: “Afanasii Afanas’evich and I are now translating the Aeneid. I consider ‘Father Aeneas’ along with Abraham, the ‘father of believers,’ to be the true ancestors of Christianity, which was (historically speaking) only a synthesis of these two forefathers” (Solov’ev 1966-70, 154-55. Tr. by Matual 1982, 276).

The influence of Solov’ev on Ivanov’s view of Vergil becomes even more apparent from yet another letter of Solov’ev to the Jesuit Paul Pierling (August 7-9, 1887):

Now that I’m spending my leisure time translating the Aeneid into Russian verse, I occasionally sense with a special acuity that mysterious and simultaneously natural necessity which made Rome the center of the Universal Church.

Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobili Saxum (πετρα)
Accolet imperiumque Pater Romanus habebit.         

Is this not a prophecy? [8]

This synthesis of biblical history with Roman values that has so greatly influenced Ivanov’s perception of Vergil found its further manifestation in Solov’ev’s 1887 translation of the Fourth Eclogue. There is little doubt that both Solov’ev and Ivanov, due to their exceptional erudition, were well aware of the secular interpretation of the poem which prevailed in the 19^th and 20^th century. Both of them, however, opted for the view of the Middle Ages Christians who considered the Fourth Eclogue “messianic”.  

In this light it is necessary to consider Ivanov’s essay on Vergil in the context of his other “Roman” texts (Torlone 2008). [9]   During his first trip to Rome in 1892 Ivanov wrote a poem entitled “Laeta” (“Joys”) (Кормчие звезды) in which he exclaimed with exhilaration: “Having reached my sacred goal, I, a pilgrim, have attained bliss” (Ivanov 1971-9, 1: 636).  Ivanov declared Rome “a new homeland”, the place where finally the “homeless traveler” could “establish the altar for his Penates”. The poem, 156 lines of elegiac distichs (in imitation of the ancient elegiac meter), was written in response to Ovidian exilic poetry. It juxtaposes Ovid’s “tristia” with the title of the poem “laeta” in order to emphasize Ivanov’s exhilaration at being in Rome. [10] Ivanov began his poem by explicitly stressing the difference between Ovid and himself:

В Рим свой Tristia слал с берегов Понтийских Овидий;
     
К Понту из Рима я шлю: — Laeta. . . (Ivanov 1971-79, 636)

From the shores of Pontus to his Rome Ovid sent his Tristia
To Pontus from Rome I am sending – Laeta: . . .

The addressee of the poem, Aleksei M. Dmitrievskii, Ivanov’s then brother-in-law and beloved friend, was residing at the time in the Crimea, which Ivanov used in the poem as a metaphor for the Ovidian Tomi. Two Latin epigraphs precede the poem: one is from Propertius 4.1.67: Roma, fave, tibi surgit opus (“Rome, be favorable, for you a [poetic] toil is rising”). The second epigraph is appropriately from Ovid: Tristia miscentur laetis (“Sad things are mixed with joyous”), not from his exilic poetry but from the Fasti 6.463. Ivanov may have seen his poem as an homage to Rome and her history in the manner of Propertius’s etiological fourth book of elegies and Ovid’s own unfinished attempt on Roman etiology.  

Apart from his personal experiences that were so inextricably connected to Rome, Rome is central to Ivanov’s poetics as the focus of the world culture in which the Russian artist could assert his place. Influenced by the writings of Vladimir Solov’ev, Ivanov saw the task of a Russian artist as two-fold: on the one hand a Russian poet living in the First Rome had a duty to contemplate thoroughly and to understand Russia’s role as the Third Rome and her “selfless ability to synthesize East and West” (Kalb 2008, 17). [11] On the other hand, the merging of East and West would be fully realized by joining in the creation of a Kingdom of God, in which the Eastern and Western churches could enter the long-awaited union. [12] Cultural unity would lead to a religious one, human culture would merge with religious faith, and the Christian Civitas Domini could be understood through Rome’s ancient past as the Caput Mundi. Thus Ivanov claimed kinship in his vision of Rome not only with Vergil and Aeneas but also with Augustine of the Confessions and Dante of the Divine Comedy.

In 1924, the year of his final move to Rome, Ivanov had lived through the deaths of his two beloved wives, Lydia Zinov’eva-Annibal and Vera Shvarsalon and the havoc of the first post-revolutionary years in Moscow and Baku. [13] He found in Rome at last his promised land and expressed his exultation in the Roman Sonnets yet again in the manner of his earlier poem “Laeta”.  The first sonnet, written a few days after his arrival, related Ivanov’s feelings of Phoenix-like rebirth, a resurrection from the cleansing fire:[14]

Вновь, арок древних верный пилигрим,
В мой поздний часвечерним "Ave, Roma"
Приветствую, как свод родного дома,
Тебя, скитаний пристань вечный Рим.

Мы Трою предков пламени дарим;
Дробятся оси колесниц меж грома
И фурий мирового ипподрома:
Ты, царь путей, глядишь, как мы горим.

И ты пылал и восставал из пепла,
И памятливая голубизна
Твоих небес глубоких не ослепла.

И помнит, в ласке золотого сна,
Твой вратарь кипарис, как Троя крепла
Когда лежала Троя сожжена. [15]

Again, true pilgrim of your vaulted past,
I greet you, as my own ancestral home,
With evening “Ave Roma” at the last,
You, wanderer’s retreat, eternal Rome.

The Troy of your forebears we give to fire;
The chariot’s axles crack from furious churning
In this hippodrome of the world entire:
You, king of roads, [16] see how we are burning.

And you went down in flames and rose from embers;
The mindful blueness did not grow blind[17]
With space in your unfathomable skies.

Your cypress, standing sentinel, remembers
In the caress of golden dream
How strong grew Troy as she lay burned in ashes.[18]

Ivanov’s lyric protagonist greets his beloved city in Latin: “Ave, Roma.” “The introduction of Latin, - as Judith Kalb observed, - “into an otherwise Cyrillic text semantically links Russia to the Western world, thus echoing the poet’s own journey from Russia to Rome” (Kalb 2008, 152).  Just as Troy had metamorphosed into Rome, so the poet felt that he had been granted another life and raised from the ashes, as he emerged from Russia in turmoil into the sun-lit piazzas of the eternal city.  The poem brings to mind Aeneas’ address to his comrades amid the devastating shipwreck (Aen. I. 202-207):

 … revocate animos maestumque timorem
mittite; forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Per varios casus, per tota discrimina rerum
tendimus in Latium, sedes ubi fata quietas
ostendunt ; illic fas regna resurgere Troiae.
Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis.

Restore your spirits, and let go of the sad fear; perhaps some day it will be pleasing to remember even this. Through various trials, through so many misfortunes we strive to reach Latium, where the fates portend peaceful dwellings; there it is permitted for Troy to rise again. Endure and save yourselves for happy events.

In contrast to Aeneas, who was terrified by the storm and uncertain of his future when he delivered these words (ll. 208-209: “talia voce refert curisque ingentibus aeger/spem vultu simulat” – “he says these words aloud but vexed with great sorrows he feigns hope on his face”), Ivanov’s triumph over fear and trying fate was unreserved. The identification with the Trojan hero en-route to his new home was not new to Ivanov’s poetry. In his first collection, The Pilot Stars, the poem “Kumy” (“Cumae”) (Ivanov 1971-9, 1: 574) referred to Aeneas’s plight again through the prophecy of the Cumaean Sibyl given to the hero during his descent to the Underworld in Book 6 of the Aeneid.  That descent had been necessary for the hero to abandon his past as a vanquished Trojan and prepare for his future as a victorious if ruthless Roman. Without the descent into the Underworld the rebirth of Aeneas from the Trojan Flammentod would have been impossible.

In the Roman Sonnets Ivanov identified himself even more with the plight of the hero Aeneas who had to undergo the transformation from a Trojan into a Roman. The poet envisioned the rise of the new city in the Trojan fire and of life out of the destroyed civilization. The hope was not feigned; it was confident and exhilarating. The cypress tree, in Roman poetry a traditional symbol of death, became a symbol of resurrection, a new beginning that the poet anticipated in Rome, his new abode. Resurrection from the annihilating fire as a spiritual rebirth was one of Ivanov’s persistent themes, which was especially prominent in his Cor Ardens collection (1911) and was even reflected in the title.  Zelinskii explained Ivanov’s interest in the theme of rebirth by means of fire with reference to the suffering and resurrected god Dionysus, Ivanov’s main scholarly interest (Zelinskii 1916, 3: 103).[19] The poem not only evoked the burned Troy but also the rebirth of Rome herself: “и ты пылал и восставал из пепла” (“and you burned and rose from the ashes”). Ivanov might have been alluding here to the numerous resurrections of the city: from destruction by the Gauls, from the great fire of Nero, from the barbarian attacks. Rome in a cyclical motion soared over time and the sky of the city became “mindful” (“памятливая”) of all its history. The word in Russian is derived from “память”  (“memory”). The idea of memory was reiterated again in relation to the cypress tree, to which the ability to remember was also attributed (Klimoff 1986, 131).  Here Ivanov was following in the footsteps of his beloved Greeks for whom loss of memory signified death: Lethe, the river of oblivion, was located in Hades; as long as memory persisted, however, resurrection was inevitable and death was kept at bay.

The second sonnet devoted to the Dioscuri twins and their role in the battle of Lake Regillus in 496 BCE as protectors of the Roman “quirites”, added to the general feeling in the Roman Sonnets of exultation and triumph over suffering, death, and despair. The poet started his triumphal walk on the Appian Way and ended on the Monte Pincio, from which he could see St Peter’s Dome. The idealization of the city is unmistakable and at times it is rather unsettling how the city is portrayed as a perfect symbiosis of all cultures, in defiance of any strife.  In that respect Vergil’s significance to Ivanov’s Roman “poetics” is especially emotional.

In the end the Russian Ivanov was more Roman than the Trojan Aeneas or even the Roman Vergil. Rome for Ivanov acquired a universalism in which the Eastern Trojan Aeneas was transformed into the founder of the Western Roman nation and the Russian poet into a harbinger of a renewed Christian ideal. For Ivanov, furthermore, Vergil (especially in the Fourth Eclogue) stood on the threshold of a new world bridging the gap between the pagan past and the Christian present and future (Kalb 2003, 32). Therefore even Vergil’s own doubts about the brutalizing price of building Rome did not enter Ivanov’s perception of Rome and his interpretation of Rome’s greatest poet. This curious detail, however, in Ivanov’s treatment of the Vergilian text is consistent with Ivanov’s overall philosophical views. In his essay “Легион и соборность” (“Legion and Communality”) Ivanov juxtaposed the two terms: “legion” represented the power of the community against which any individual within that community is powerless; “соборность” (“communality”) was the Orthodox concept of a unity of believers in the Church through Christ within which any individual is respected and valued.[20] That concept, in Olga Deschartes’ words, “unifies the living with the living and the living with the dead, it springs from Memoria Aeterna and creates the Communio Sanctorum” (tr. Kalb 2008, 147).  While Ivanov associated ancient Rome and the new communist Russia with the concept of the “legion,” “соборность” for him was a uniquely old Slavic concept, which was closely linked both to Ivanov’s “metatemporal, or ‘panchronic’ interpretation and representation of culture” and to his belief that Russia and the Russians had a “Roman” unifying mission in the history of Christendom (Meerson 1999, 719. Ivanov 1971-9, 3: 259-60).  

In this light Vergil’s work was not treated by Ivanov as a text of the emerging Roman empire conquering the world with its imperial collective enforced by legions but as a religious text transfigured in the epiphanic light of unifying соборность.  Ivanov, the new Aeneas, walked from the ancient gates of Rome to the citadel of the Christian fate. This journey in the Roman Sonnets also showed Ivanov’s move from the classics to Christ; like Dante he chose Vergil to be his guide and then abandoned him at the gates of St Peter’s because, as a pagan, even Vergil must be barred from the Kingdom of God.

That spiritual journey through Rome also fit into Ivanov’s perception of Russia as a “Third Rome,” which, unlike her Roman predecessor, would have different priorities. Ivanov thought of the Russian revolution as he was writing his sixth sonnet “Fontana delle Tartarughe” (Kalb 2003, 37). The entry in his diary dated 3 December 1924 read: “The entire time I’ve been abroad, I’ve been maintaining, ‘Hannibal ad portas’ ” (Ivanov (1971-9, 3: 852).  By interpreting communism as Russia’s Hannibal, and thus her undoing, Ivanov linked together Russian and Roman history.[21] While Russia, with Hannibal-communism at her gates, was temporarily unable to fulfill her Christian mission, Ivanov, like a Russian Aeneas, took upon himself the task of representing the “Third Rome” in the First one until Hannibal could be defeated.

In this respect Russia’s designation as the spiritual Third Rome (although temporarily hindered in its mission) becomes particularly poignant. In his essay “On the Russian Idea” (“О русской идее”) Ivanov revealed his expectations: “You, Russian, must remember one thing: universal truth is your truth and if you want to preserve your soul, do not be afraid to lose it” (Ivanov 1971-9, 3: 326).  Here Vergil’s importance for Ivanov was disclosed by the author himself through his citation of the famous Vergilian lines in Aeneid 6. 788-853 alongside his injunction to Russians. When Aeneas descended into the Underworld in Book 6 to hear the prophecy from his father Anchises about his destiny, Anchises showed him the “Roman parade” populated by the future great figures of Roman history; following Augustus were the souls of heroes from earlier times – the kings of Rome, then the great men of the republic, ending with the two Scipios who had defeated the Carthaginians and Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator who had saved Italy from Hannibal. Anchises broke off this pageant to prophesy Rome’s mission (Aeneid 6. 851-853):

tu regere imperio populos, memento,
(hae tibi erunt artes pacique imponere morem
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

Roman, remember to rule the nations under your sway (these will be your arts), and to impose the custom of peace, to spare the vanquished and to bring down the haughty.

Ivanov construed these Vergilian lines not as an expression of “national selfishness but the providential will and idea of sovereign Rome in the process of becoming the world” (Ivanov 1971-9, 3: 326).[22] Subsequently, he borrowed the didactic tone for his message to his compatriots, but the imperial pride was gone, replaced by a spiritual quest. In this essay Ivanov made it clear that Rome represented for him not just an image of empire but a spiritual entity with a spiritual mission, thus again linking classical antiquity to Christian values on the common basis of faith. Russia’s loss of itself would culminate in a resurrection of the spirit just as Troy in the Roman Sonnets rose from ashes to become Rome. By understating Roman imperial aspirations and linking them with Russia’s spiritual role in the world Ivanov moved even further away from the world of classical antiquity into the world of Christian faith.

Translation [23]

Jam nova progenies [24]  

(Quote from Virgil on Rafael’s Sibyl frescos in S. Maria della Pace.)

Probably due to its roots in the mythological and magical realms, the Medieval Age possessed a refined, reliable, and instinctual feeling for all kinds of affinities, congruencies, analogies, and elective affinities [25] that rule over the nature and the spiritual realm. This instinctual feeling characteristic of the Medieval Age lends the charm of persuasive spontaneity to its universal symbolism in thought and creativity. Such a divination of essential relationships then also became obvious in the Medieval assessment of Virgil: “the greatest of the poets” (“poetarum maximo”).  In this formulation, the apostle Paul was said to have mourned the pre-Christian poet as he was spreading tidings of Christ among the heathens, according to a hymn, “Ad Maronis Mausoleum,” that was still performed on Paul’s feast day in the fifteenth century Mantua.[26]  The darkly foreboding belief and superstition of the medieval era attributed to the Roman poet Virgil a deeper grasp of his final role, namely as a mediator between two cultural realms. That grasp went deeper than some of the Humanist judgments about his well-sounding verse, the lovely natural truth of his “rura,” [“countryside”] and the lack of success in a contest with Homer inflicted upon him.[27] It was not only because of the Fourth Eclogue, whose apparent miracle converts Dante’s Statius to Christianity (“per te poeta fui, per te cristiano,” Purg. XXII, 73) [“Through you I was a poet, and through you, a Christian”], that the medieval soul selected the son of Magia Polla[28] to be the ideal portrait of the theurgic poet, with the Muses’ power of memory and at the same time with Sibyl’s divinatory power: the medieval soul had by necessity to be pleased by the prevailing tone of all of his creations.  Characteristic in this regard is the praise of the Aeneid that Dante places in Statius’s pronouncement (Purg. XXI, 88-92).[29] The Aeneid was of course for “thousands and thousands” truly “mother and wetnurse” (“mamma e nutrice”); above all, it was their poet’s [Virgil’s] special focus on the teleological and the eschatological that appealed to the spiritual constitution of the age to the same degree as antiquity looking to the past was foreign to them.   

Whatever temporal position Virgil may assume – whether he, with Aeneid, is striving towards the chosen promised land, or whether he sees Daphnis’s resurrection mythically reflected in the world affairs of the present,[30] or even in proclaiming with holy impatience a greeting to the first rays of sunlight of the then just beginning “novus saeclorum ordo”[31] [“a great succession of ages is born anew”] with unprecedented hymns, “o mihi tam longae maneat pars ultima vitae” [“O, let the last part of a long life still linger for me”] (Ecl. IV, 53) – Virgil, moved by a deeply felt longing, always practices that virtue [hope] undervalued by ancient wisdom that, according to the Christian “re-evaluation of all values,” counts “Hope,” Spes, among the three cardinal virtues, as siblings of Caritas and Fides. As far as the last virtue [Fides] is concerned, does the Aeneid, in conflict with the Bible, not praise loyalty as the source of everything that is proven to be truly great and fruitful in human activity? It is amazing that this outwardly so robust age needed such an anachronistic spirituality to provide in a lasting fashion the memory of humanity with the puzzling news that it had arrived at a turning point. It seems, in fact, that the innermost strands and cell structure of this sensitive soul – one who is immediately conscious of the secret fact of standing on the threshold of a universal Transcensus[32] – will somehow transform themselves and change towards the waft of the approaching new world, so that this taciturn and shy man, the voice of his epoch, appears to even his closest friends and intellectual peers as a miraculous stranger. Do the shadows preceding the coming events reach so far back that the Medieval Age already began when great Pan, according to Plutarch’s tale, had just died?[33] Does Virgil no longer belong completely to Antiquity, but also already to the “progenies” [“offspring”] who in fact know themselves to be installed in Heaven – announced by him even if not having come down from Heaven (“caelo demittiur alto,” – [“sent from the high heaven”] Ecl. IV, 7) – and whose [offspring’s] historical millennium began only after the final victories of the new religion?

“Anima cortese” (Inf. II, 58), “ombra gentil” (Purg. XVIII, 82) – with these words Virgil’s noble and gentle nature is praised by the one who said, “amor e il cor gentil sono una cosa” [“love and a gentle heart are but one thing”] (Vita Nuova XX), and one will easily agree with the disciple [Dante] that these ornate adjectives [“cortese” and “gentil”] suit his “dolce maestro” well – these linguistic symbols of values that quite accurately mark the high point of Medieval civilization. Virgil’s classical virtues are, in the light of his innate “morbidezza” [morbidity], in the process of - Nietzsche would say “degeneration” – we mean to say: of the refinement and transfiguration of Christian virtues. In his piety, based in ritual tradition, a deeper and more spiritual devotion to God shines through, one that brings him a deep trust in divine providence and direction, “o passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem” [“Oh you, who have suffered greater evils, god will put an end to these [sorrows] as well,”] (Aen. I, 199).[34] A line from the messianic Eclogue “incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem” [“Little boy, begin to acknowledge your mother by smiling.”][35] reveals that the poet views the picture of pure motherliness – one can confidently say: the ideal of the Madonna – with the eyes of a Rafael.[36] His contemporaries – even those among them who were only joking – spoke of, were surprised and moved, by his “castitas” [“chastity”]. The only amorous adventure to occur during Aeneas’s wanderings, an adventure that imitates that of Odysseus[37] and is indispensable in the context of Dido’s tragedy, one that would have provided Ariosto with a welcome opportunity for an elaborately decorated representation – the encounter with the royal huntress in a forest cave during a thunderstorm that interrupts the hunt – is not only dispensed with in modest and restrained manner, but is also accompanied with a harsh reprimand: “ille dies primus leti primusque malorum causa fuit” [“this day was the first one of destruction and the first cause of evils].”[38] Even if Virgil’s Dido is as closely related to Medea of the Hellenistic “ Argonautica” [Argonautenfahrt] of Apollonius,[39]  as Camilla[40] is to the classical Penthesilea of Aethiopis[41] the Romanticism of Vergil’s female figures contains a sense of sentimentality and chivalry that was, with good reason, taken up eagerly by Renaissance art both verbally and visually.

The horrific deeds of war, whose cruelty increases, with a nod to the Homeric canon, by the feeding of Pallas’s men with the blood of sacrificed prisoners of war (Aen. 10, 517ff.), are not carried out by Aeneas in a gruesome craze, such as was the case with Achilles drunk with anger inspired by Ares. Instead Aeneas carries out these deeds as an impersonal executor of a cruel priestly duty. For otherwise his compassion far exceeds the measure of humanity corresponding to cultural standards, be they of the Homeric Age, or of the era of the gladiatorial games. The hero [Aeneas] “ingemuit miserans graviter” [“groans heavily as he pities”] while looking at the youthful Lausus, who as a loyal son is just as “pius” [“duty-bound”] as he himself and who nonetheless is to be slain by his own hand (Aen. X, 823).[42] At the last moment he wants to spare Turnus (Aen. XII, 940): the gods do not allow him to do so.[43] While self-sacrifice by virtue of the love for a friend, a moving example of which we have before us in the story of Euryalus and Nisus, is classical – not, however, the expression that the entire guilt of the heroic boy consists of his “nimium dilexit” [“loved too much”] (Aen. IX, 430) – a strange coincidence with the “quoniam dilexit multum” [“because he loved a lot”] of the Gospel of Luke (VII, 47); and the postmortem call of the poet to the fallen: “the two of you are most fortunate”  (“fortunati ambo”, ib. 446)[44] rings paradoxical in spite of the assurance of eternal fame that is to motivate him: not until Christian ecstasy, that Rome was to witness a century later, did the martyr’s death seem to be similarly enviable.

This much on the poet’s spiritual constitution that distances itself from his environment, as the first yellowish autumnal leaves contrast with the green of the high summer. You can best grasp his way of thinking, however, when you look more precisely at his treatment of the philosophical historical problem in his heroic poem.

The belief which for the Greeks is clearly characterized by the content of their ideas and the inherent dialectics of basic knowledge as the point of departure for a philosophy of history – verified, by the way, by Aristotle’s concurrence – is especially Aeschylus’s and Herodotus’s magnificent view of the Persian wars as the pinnacle of the age-old struggle between Europe, proud of the ethical makeup of the free ancient Greeks, and Asia, with its Libyan foothills, represented by the principle of theocratic despotism. Virgil remains true to this view, in his own, truly Roman way, as one for whom Hellas represents the transmitter of tradition, Urbs Roma represents the universal city. This perspective provides him with a deeper justification for the dispute with Carthage over world rule, a struggle that was decisive for the development of national power, and helps to interpret the divine directive that duteously burdened his hero with the painful dispute with Dido. To be sure, the poet must, in order to adapt the classical theory to his national point of view, undertake a colossal adjustment: he removes the Trojan War, where the Greeks perceive an important moment precisely in their struggle with the Orient, from the traditional connections, blames Ilion’s fall only on Laomedon and the Priamides (“Laomedonteae luimus periuria Troiae:, Georg. I, 502;[45] “culpatus … Paris”[46], Aen. II, 602 – Aeneas, as we know, belongs by lineage to an auxiliary strand of the royal house),[47] and, highlighting this artificially, has the Trojan people, after emigrating to Hesperia, appear to be the true bearers and shapers of the civic ideal [“Polisidee”] of the Occident. Yet even this very broad scope appears too narrow for the lofty flight of the poet; proof of the historical necessity and the beneficial effects of this new world regime, supplied (most insistently via Polybius) by political historiography are not enough for him: he strives to make the case for transcendental justification of the events in order to prove for everyone the religious consecration of Roman political power.

In opposition to the early attempt at a historical synthesis, those old and new views on the cyclical course of world history attempted by Virgil –- that is to say [in opposition to] the teachings [a] on the ages of the world, so different from each other and yet basically so insightful, [b] on the cataclysms periodically renewing the face of the earth, as Plato describes them in Timaeus,[48] [c] on the great year of the world and the ensuing return of all things (the apokatastasis of the stoics),[49] and [d] the expectations of the coming dawn of the “aetas aurea” [Golden Age] following the course of the first millennium since the destruction of Troy roused namely through the sibylline teachings -- seemed [to be] more cosmological speculation than historico-philosophical insights, as they contained no rational explanation of the historical process, no matter how productive they seemed to be in forming the foundation of a mystical historiography.[50] Virgil had then listened to and pondered over the wisdom of his ancestors and over the oracles with precisely the same devout fervor as he was to have later made the legend (canonized in Rome) of the founding of Lavinium by Aeneas, that was to remove any doubts about the Trojan origin of the Roman polity, an object of a teleological re-creation interpreting both the legendary pre-history as well as the history that was to grow from it. That is to say, we see him in his first creative phase as a bucolic poet[51] enthused by eschatological ideas and dedicated to the dreamlike messianic faces, traces of whom he indeed already found in his pastoral poet-master – Theocritus (“Herakliskos” l. 86ff.);[52] however, in later years, without breaking with the inspirational premonitions of his youth, as he searches for material for a national epos, following the track of the publicly acknowledged myth linking Rome with Troy, he immerses himself in meditations on the fate of his people - a fate at once wonderful and yet evolving so logically – and then finds once again confirmation and inspiration in the model itself: he was of course also reading in his Homer (among numerous prophecies, all of which pointed to the basic notion of predestination) that famous prophecy of Poseidon about the rebirth of Troy and the descendents of Aeneas down to the latest generation to be promised political power (Il. XX, 305ff.).[53] Could he at this point be unsure where he should begin in order to let Rome’s destination shine forth most effectively in all its glory and holiness? Did not the words of that god, favorably inclined toward the Trojan name, but furious over the treason of Priam’s ancient city, already contain the core of the entire future fateful development.

It was thus necessary to continue Homer’s Bible, not, to be sure, solely as sacred history, in order to show how the word of the prophet had been fulfilled, but also as continuous prophecy so that while seeing the past one continuously has a view of the great future toward which the secretly working higher powers – “numina magna deum” [“the great powers of the gods”] (Aen. II, 623) – are wisely leading. To be sure, only in the light of this future can the reader assess the entire force of that which once was destined as rescue or as a test, can assess the complete value of that which was so laboriously achieved, by considering its most far-removed dire consequences for the fate of the world: “tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem” [“of so great effort was it to found the Roman race”] (Aen. I, 33). Thus the Italic prophet’s song of Aeneas’s flight to Latium becomes a universal revelation of the divine plan of human history.

This expansion of the visual and mental sphere resulted, however, in its own retrospective force upon the mode of presentation, one that in no way represented a change for the better when seen and judged from a purely artistic point of view. The visage of the epic muse, who up to this point looked into the past without asking the Fata residing therein as to its meaning and purpose, now consciously averts its gaze to the things that then had to come – in fact, she conjures them up because she recognizes their essence – and now we, deeply touched, see as her face suddenly turns pale. Myth flows into history without becoming one with it – Torquato Tasso imitated this manner with the greatest enthusiasm - and we now stand precisely at the confluence of the two differently colored streams. An artistic antinomy springs from the intuition transcending time, unable to overcome the latter despite the high mastery of the poet. He neutralizes the opposition by transforming mythology into teleology and theology; no surprise that their original abundance of life [Lebensfülle][54] is impoverished. The subjugation of the mythological under a notional heading that did not develop spontaneously from its original core resulted inevitably in a reduction of its fresh immediacy, of its naïve joy in the “free play of the living powers,”[55] resulted in a weakening of that poetic inhibition that we are accustomed to treasure as characteristic of “pure poetry”; this is a congenital danger against which the organism of a work of art can protect itself as with an antidote by increasing the romantic element. One cannot avoid seeing the internal split between the muse and the sibylline in the final organic epic of antiquity: for, despite all the anguish and artificiality of an organically created product of its own dubious time, a time that had new meaning and that, in its own way, was one creating its own mythology. But is it not in the nature of things that a Swan Song should consist of something exaggerated that shows that a life is running dry? Thus it is no less beautiful because it no longer belongs to the Earth, according to Plato, but glorifies Apollo, revealed to the dying in the glory of the eternal.

In this way, too, the hero’s de-humanization[56] was predestined; this was so often blamed on the singer of Aeneid, without properly appreciating his hieratic seriousness and his intention that reached almost beyond the limits of art: the intention aimed at presenting a being born on high, the son of a heavenly mother, indeed free of any individual desires, who finds his completely devout self anew in the fulfillment of his noble profession as bearer of the gods and savior of his people.

In order to carry out his intention the poet had to know how to show the progression and the connections of the events in such a way as to be obvious at each step how each event - like a spark of electricity - results through contact with the earliest to the most remote promises and those occurrences only halfway revealed. To accomplish this, however, two theoretical conditions had to be met and Virgil’s drawing this double insight from the depths of his spirit capable of seeing the world in god is an irrefutable sign of his originality and the main reason for his historical impact.

He is probably the first classical poet to speak of national determination as a mission (and this was one of the two prerequisites). He claims that the individual calling of his people develops its own special idea, one necessary for the economic entelechy and to represent it [this idea] in its historical essence. This is the intuition forming the foundation of the celebratory warning “tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento, hae tibi erunt artes” [“You, Roman, remember to rule nations with your sway. These will be your arts”] (Aen. VI, 851ff.)[57] and combining the two opposing postulates – national self-determination on the one hand, universal on the other – within one harmonious single entity.

The second prerequisite, closely connected to the first, was the belief in divine providence. If we look more closely at the content of this belief we can, at first, hardly deny the impression of a striking similarity between Virgil’s ideas and the stoic teachings of Pronoia.[58] So, for example, the Stoic Q. Lucilius Balbus’s speech in Cicero (De Natura Deorum II) [(“On Nature of the Gods”)] seems to anticipate the poet’s views on the methods, means, and goals of divine intervention in the course of history.[59] The gods take care of the human race; they desire its union with a society fulfilling the ethical ideal and especially favor those communities that contribute the most to that end. They lead and save the states and the statesmen whom they use for their high goal and teach them through inspiration and prophecies, dreams and wondrous signs. Without their help, even the greatest would not have been able to accomplish anything meaningful: “nemo … vir magnus sine aliquo adflatu divino umquam fuit” [“There was never a great man without some divine inspiration”] (ibid. 66,167). For this reason, Homer shows individual gods aligned with their favorite heroes as leaders and protectors. Providence directs the course of humanity towards the highest good. This is what the Stoa thought; the poet’s pious notion was different. It [Stoa] taught that the gods themselves, citizens along with humans in the common state called the Cosmos, were part of the cycle and realm of power of natural life. Stoic divination (“anum fatidicam, Stoicorum Pronoian quam latine licet Providentiam dicere” ibid. I, 8, 18) [“the fate bearing year, the pronoia of the Stoics which in Latin is called Providence”] was thought to be pantheistic and derived from the perspective of a Logos immanent in nature. Virgil, however, still honoring Homer’s Dios aisa [“divine fate”] and the monotheistic interpretation of this concept in Aeschylus,[60] understands “deorum fata” (and he already speaks of “fatum” in the first words of his heroic poem) as an absolutely transcendental effect of the supernatural powers that lead the select humans to their predestined salvation goal according to a preordained plan. All these beliefs were probably in agreement with native intellectual currents of his age that arose out of the mysterious Hellenistic religions. And once he had achieved this precise notion of divination he applies it to his own, chosen people as a whole and to this people’s individual male leaders.

And so in Virgil’s presentation of the wanderings and warring struggles of “pater Aeneas” we have before us a kind of saint’s life reminiscent of Bible stories – instead of a heroic saga of the classic mold full of fame and suffering resulting in a mythological justification of the respective heroic cult.[61] This life introduces an unpredictable series of deeds not all carried by that single hero, but at a later time by the inheritors of his mission. This life also merely functions as the beginning of an immeasurable exposition of fate, in the face of which Virgil sees himself more as precursor of that exposition and as god’s tool than as the creator of the exposition. Like Abraham, Aeneas can only find solace during his tribulations in the distant vision of his lineage, numerous and glorious as the stars in the heavens.[62] For the “pater Indiges”[63] not only sees as his lineage his descendents as Trojan families, but the entire Roman people entrusted to his care. This is his state of mind in the Elysian “Parade of Heroes” (Aen. VI, 752-892), where he becomes acquainted face to face with the unborn succession of predestined multipliers of the Roman name, or while he watches the images presenting the future history of Rome, including the battle at Actium on the shield forged for him, as once for Achilles, by Vulcan: “imagine gaudet, attollens umero famamque et fata nepotum” [“he rejoiced in the imagery taking upon his shoulder the glory and the fates of his descendants”] (Aen. VIII, 730f.). Strange in all of this is that in the unworldly region of timeless being – like in god’s thinking – all of these souls, chosen to carry out the divine plan and not yet become flesh, yes, even the events themselves that will only play out in long centuries to come, stand finished and firmly formed as ethereal images of light that Aeneas observes and the god of the arts depicts. And from this viewpoint of the poet there is no doubt that a so far-reaching determination is at all reconcilable with human free will: so pure and complete is the conviction of the “candida anima” [“beautiful soul”], the good human being “ut melior vir non alius quisquam” [“that no other man is better”]– as Horace imagined and admired his character as the moral foundation of his “ingenium ingens” [“immense talent”] (Sat. I, 5, 41; 3, 32f.)[64] – that the free will of the chosen is seen as one with the will of god.

Still, not even the glory of the earthly realm, shown to the ancestor, is the bottom line of Virgilian historical wisdom. The visionary is able to see further; and his early, pleasing vision “is ever present in his mind.”  He sees a child of god in the cradle smiling at the pure mother and the whole of nature all around wondrously transformed. Who is the “puer” who causes the paradise of the Golden Age on Earth to blossom anew? Is Aeon of the Greek-Egyptian mystery rites,[65] born of the virgin, whose happy news long echoes in the sounds of Sibylline voices (as Norden, Die Geburt des Kindes, thinks),[66] - probably the same playing youth Aeon, about whom Heraclitus (fr. 52) had whispered dark things, likely following the orphic notion of the dallying child Dionysus-Zagreus and the representative of his father Zeus in ruling the world?[67] Whatever the case, in any event, Virgil is true to himself. Anchises’s shadow is a reference to the final goal of the entire development in the Aeneid, in that he, in the “Parade of Heroes” pointing to Augustus’s shining image , says, “hic vir, hic est . . . aurea condet saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva Saturno quondam” [“He is, he is the man . . . who  will establish again the Golden Age in Latium throughout the lands once ruled by Saturn”] (VI, 791f.).[68] The Pax Romana itself, according to the poet’s innermost thoughts, is only a precondition and preparation for the return of the “Saturnia regna” [“the realm of Saturn”](Ecl. IV, 6): then “the remaining tracks of our sins will be erased and the earth will be saved from eternal horror” (ibid. 13 ff., in Norden’s translation). It would hardly be possible to more precisely define in advance the teachings of the Christian era, beginning with the Golden Age of the Redeemer.

It would surely never have occurred to Homeric Hephaistos to use his art for prophecies, something Aeneid inappropriately entrusts to its journeyman’s seriousness; however, no other fate was to be ordained to the author himself than that of an artist. Quite far away he [the artist] removes himself without notice from the epic military path, yes, from the whole classical view of res gestae, a view that up to then Mnemosyne alone had been responsible for along with her golden daughters. And the further he strays from the trodden path, the more obvious it becomes for us, who can see broader horizons, the basic convergence of his historiosophy, half concealed by the veil of poetry, with the first perfectly uniform, and complete historiosophic system; a system, presented magnificently, that draws us into a long series of texts extending from the Book of Genesis to Daniel. Accordingly, Virgil’s interpretation of history lies temporally between the Bible and St. Augustine’s masterpiece De Civitate Dei. The interpretation becomes the foundation of the medieval teaching about the meaning of Rome (cf. Dante’s Inf. II, 20-24). It is only natural that the texts that led to this interpretation found their place in the literary treasure chest of the Christian era from the beginning. When Emperor Constantine begins the negotiations of the first Ecumenical Council in Nicaea by reading the messianic Eclogues in a Greek version, the translations of the Aeneid used by the oriental church fathers prove, on the other hand, that its universal meaning for Christianity has been grasped and honored prophetically.

Following the collapse of the ecumenical ideal that fades out in Dante’s treatise De Monarchia, the newly born national consciousness mines from the same query, fulfilling its needs in accordance with its capacity. The songs of praise of Italy in Aeneid and in the second book of the Georgics inspire Petrarch to patriotic hymns. Virgil’s vernacular becomes a holy relic, a spiritual palladium of nations proud of belonging to the “genus Latinum” by descent, language, moral stance. If the feeling of ecumenical unity of Christian culture is to awaken anew as a stirring force, the forehead of the great poet – who combined through mediation the historical prerequisites of this comprehensive unity (Rome and the Greek Orient, classical heritage, and New Testament hope) in his gentle sensitivity and even more gentle premonition  – must be adorned with more abundant and more fragrant laurel branches than with wilted ones sprung up not in sacred groves, more abundant than our epoch - practicing memory as archeology, not experiencing time as the eternal present in the spirit - is able to weave.

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Notes

© John M. Jeep and Zara Martirosova Torlone [an error occurred while processing this directive]