Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order by Charles Hill

Author:Charles Hill [Hill, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Poltical Science
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-05-31T15:00:00+00:00

Auden is rationally right, but poetically wrong. Virgil’s use of time creates layers of meaning and feeling in every line. His cross-cutting perspective back and forth across centuries creates an eerie sense that one is actually experiencing the origins of civilization. When Aeneas, in search of allies, goes to the little rustic settlement of old King Evander, who lives in a pastoral setting with cows grazing and birds chirping, we shiver a bit in recognition that he is at the foot of the Palatine Hill in what one day will be Rome, the capital of the world.

The aged King Evander welcomes Aeneas to his humble cottage with the words, “Dare to despise wealth.” Doing so would make one worthy of a divine visit such as Hercules had paid Evander. Augustus, Evander’s successor in the far future, should dwell simply too, for the same reason. In Evander’s hut, Aeneas, the Trojan, will be cured of his luxury-loving “eastern” ways.

Every word and action in the Aeneid is loaded with meaning that the reader perceives but Aeneas does not, because this history has not happened yet. The Aeneid is a journey toward a historical destiny that is already fulfilled but that has never—until Virgil tells about it—been fully explained or given its portentous significance for the world.

That journey will be accomplished through statecraft. But Aeneas still does not know—or only dimly knows—where he must go, or why. Book 6 is of enormous importance as Aeneas tries to get to the Underworld to meet his dead father, for only in the Underworld can a leader learn of his mission.

Before Aeneas can get to the Underworld, he must bury the body of his comrade Misenus. Misenus must die and be buried so that Aeneas can visit the Underworld and then return to life. Otherwise the body count would not be correct and Aeneas would be trapped down there.

But that’s a side issue. The striking scene is when Aeneas and his men plunge into an ancient wood to cut the timber for Misenus’s funeral pyre (6: 179-182). In only four lines—in the Latin—Virgil provides a vivid picture, from entering the wood to cutting down the trees, to rolling the felled trunks down the mountain. It is clear that this brief episode stands for more than appears on the surface. This is a project of concentrated, well-directed effort, a microcosm of the power, organization, and focus of the Roman world system to come. In the seventeenth-century translation by John Dryden:

An ancient Wood, fit for the Work design’d

(the shady Covert of the Salvage Kind)

The Trojans found: The sounding Axe is ply’d:

Firs, Pines and Pitch-Trees, and the tow’ring Pride

Of Forest Ashes, feel the fatal Stroke:

And piercing Wedges cleave the stubborn Oak

Huge trunks of Trees, fell’d from the steepy Crown

Of the bare Mountains, rowl with Ruin down.

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