Michigan (2022) p/b 277pp £27.95 (ISBN 9780472039166)
This accessible and highly interesting book first appeared in 2005 and is now being reissued in paperback. S. provides an introduction to this 2nd edition which discusses some of the literature which has appeared in the last seventeen years and which sets the original book in its 2005 theoretical context, but the text of the book (including some typographical errors) is unchanged from 2005.
The Aeneid undoubtedly exercised a ‘formative influence’ on its ‘broad audience of educated Romans’. The poem was everywhere: in graffiti, in classroom language lessons in Greek Egypt, in private books and in public recitations. Roman children were taught how to declaim it properly and mash-ups of the poem called centos were compiled with often hilariously obscene results, such as Ausonius’ exuberant Cento Nuptialis. Men wrote commentaries on it and even told their fortunes from it. Young readers had it burned into their memories and found that its effects were moral and emotional as well as merely educational, as we see from the Confessions of St Augustine. S. argues that this poem was valuable in shaping the culture of its readership and was a decisive instrument of spreading Romanitas through the growing empire, not least through its use of ‘visuality’ (which played to the reader’s imagination by means of set-piece descriptions and ecphrases) and ‘sublimity’ which induced awe by the irresistible power of its words. Not all philosophers approved of poetry’s ability to move us beyond (and despite) our reason: Plato felt that vicarious emotions induced by tragedy were detrimental to the rational soul, Aristotle thought it cathartic, the Stoics were not keen on passions being whipped up, and so on—but they all agreed that poetry like this could change the world, and many non-philosophers regarded the poet as in some way a moral teacher (e.g. Horace Epistles 2.1.126-31), and poetry as beneficial for the health of the soul and the city.
Part 2 of this book is centred around the ‘gaze’, and S. draws a neat distinction between spectator and spectacle: the subjective empathetic gaze of a leading character such as Aeneas and the objective sympathetic gaze which allows readers to differentiate themselves from the characters depicted. Aeneas is set up as a spectator of events (57), as a model audience, who can tell the difference between ‘false pictures’ and ‘true voices’ in seeing through the disguise of his mother in Book 1. We see Carthage through his astonished eyes (1.421-9) and he drinks in the imagery of Greek savagery and treachery on the temple of Juno. Aeneas’ education is often visual, as when his mother shows him the gods fighting over Troy, and even subconscious, as when he ‘rejoices at the picture’ of the shield even though he does not understand what it is saying (8.730). All this is good: but when S. goes on to say that ‘The control over emotional reactions to images is what makes Aeneas unique and confers on him the role of model audience in his own story… his control over the emotions is paradigmatic’ (86) most readers will recall Aeneas’ reactions to the sight of Pallas’ sword-belt at the end of the poem and protest that this man’s emotional control still needs some work.
If Aeneas does the looking, women often make a spectacle of themselves and ‘their gazes are themselves gazed at’ (87). S. discusses our sympathetic response to characters such as Dido and Andromache, where the reader ‘experiences her feelings but does not fully identify with them’ (88). Dido is most certainly a tragic figure in many senses: her presentation is theatrical and her death is nothing if not dramatic. Aeneas’ famously inscrutable feelings about his lover—is (e.g.) the ‘great love’ at 4.395 his or hers?—are well discussed and seen as a good example of how women in this text wear their hearts more visibly on their sleeves than our buttoned-up hero. Similar things are well said about Andromache’s patent grief for Hector, Amata’s crazed passion for her prospective son-in-law, and Juno’s anger. The gender divide is not absolute—Turnus (for instance) does his fair share of showing emotion—but a comparison of how Allecto inflames him and Amata is instructive: Amata is already on fire with emotion and needs little help from Allecto to bring her to frenzy, whereas Turnus is an unwilling victim of her wiles and needs the full flaming-torch treatment. This process of rendering female emotion as spectacle is seen by S. as part of the authorial plan: it distances the reader from them, allowing him to ‘purge himself of their dangerous passions’ (136).
S. takes a similar look at the use of ethnicity: Dido (after all) embodies ‘double otherness’ as a foreigner as well as a woman. Carthage provided the Romans ‘with an Other against which to define themselves’ (143). Dido accuses Aeneas of cunning and deceit—which are often seen as Carthaginian traits—and her ‘identity as a woman in love is inextricably intertwined with her ethnic identity’ (144). The argument here is that ethnic otherness distances a character from our empathy—an otherness which many writers used on that other foreign queen Cleopatra: S. at one point (192) calls Dido a ‘tamed Cleopatra’ and shows (188) how Roman readers regarded Cleopatra’s flight from Actium as equivalent to Dido’s irresponsible abdication of queenly power (after Aeneas appears on the scene) as a sign of oriental female weakness when put in positions of power. The difficulty with all this is that readers have always loved Dido. If anything, her ethnic characterisation humanizes her and makes her a more rounded person than her unresponsive lover. The didactic trope here is humanitas rather than Romanitas and the lesson for the Roman reader is surely one of accepting and absorbing ethnic otherness into the growing Roman world, a point which is implicit in much of this book but needs spelling out in this case.
S.’s reading of the text can lack nuance at times. She mentions Chloreus (11.768-77) as ‘proof’ of Trojan luxury in appearance, but the point of this passage is to explain why Camilla went after this highly conspicuous target, and also to induce sympathy with a wandering foreigner so obviously out of place on a battlefield. She suggests that his treatment may ‘give… validity to such stereotypes’ (199), but I would urge that it is sympathetic orientalism rather than xenophobic caricature. She cites Iarbas (4.215-7) or Turnus (12.97-100) dishing out racist abuse of their rival (and Numanus Remulus upbraiding the Trojans at 9.614-20) but their indulgence in racist stereotypes says much more about themselves than it does about the Trojans, and only later (226) does S. point out correctly that ‘the Aeneid undermines ethnicity as a defining category for the ancient self in favor of the concept of Roman identity’. Indeed the book ends with (222-3) a marvellous evocation of how the Aeneid shows us a melting pot of diverse groups where ‘Italians, Etruscans and Greeks fight are found on both sides of a war… By AD 212 the community of Roman citizens was more culturally heterogeneous than most modern nations are today… The Aeneid did the cultural work of defining what Roman identity meant… in these changed circumstances’. This new world of imperial Rome was one where you were not necessarily born Roman but you could well become Roman by imbibing the values of works such as the Aeneid, which presented ethical rather than ethnic criteria for belonging to the biggest and most disparate family on earth: ‘only a shared language and literature as well as shared cultural icons like the Aeneid could sustain such cultural unity as existed in the Roman empire’ (24).
The book is engagingly and accessibly written, with most Latin and Greek translated into English. There is a full bibliography, index locorum and a general index. The main shortcoming of the book is acknowledged in the final paragraph: the evidence is far too heavily weighted towards the first half of the poem and massively important characters such as Camilla (where on earth would she fit into the binary scheme of gender and ethnicity?) are given too little attention. It is however a lively read at a sensible price and worth every penny for the new insights it gives us into the place and the power of this iconic poem in the new world of the Roman Empire.
John Godwin