From the time of its composition through the end of the twentieth century, the number of people who could read the Aeneid comfortably in the original seldom rose much above 10 per cent of the total population, but this minority included the wealthy, influential aristocrats and churchmen who shaped the society in which they lived. Indeed for centuries this educated elite also accounted for most of the people who could afford to own a copy of the text. For fifteen of the twenty centuries that followed the publication of the poem, the only choice for anyone who wanted to own a copy of the Aeneid was to make one himself or to pay someone to do it for him. Neither of these options was open to the poor: even the former required a substantial investment of time and access to a base text in someone else’s library, and those who took the latter option often used the manuscript they commissioned to advertise their wealth and social standing by having it beautifully illustrated and bound. Once it was finished, such a manuscript became a treasured cultural commodity, passed from hand to hand in a series of exchanges that conferred prestige once again on each new owner. Among the seven earliest manuscripts copied by the sixth century, for example, is the ‘‘codex Romanus’’ (Rome, Vatican Library, Vat. Lat. 3867), prepared for a wealthy patron in Rome at the end of the fifth century,
Present in the royal abbey of St Denis for much of the Middle Ages, then listed in the first inventory of the Vatican Library in 1475 (Reynolds 1983: 433-4; Wright 2001: 68). The same pattern prevailed for the thousand or so manuscripts of the Aeneid copied over the next millennium (Alessio 1984: 432-43). The manuscript at Paris, Bibliotheque Natio-nale, Latin 7939A, for example, was copied by the Venetian nobleman Leonardo Sanudo, after which it entered the French royal library in 1669. Similarly London, British Library, Kings MS 24 was executed for Lodovico Agnelli, apostolic protonotary for Pope Sixtus IV and secretary to Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga; it then passed to Joseph Smith, the English consul in Venice, and entered the library of King George III in 1765 (Alexander 1994: 109-11, items 42 and 43).
In theory the invention of printing in the fifteenth century lowered the cost of books, increasing correspondingly the number of possible readers, but it is important not to overstate the potential for change at the beginning, at least: a small pocket-sized book initially cost 5 to 10 percent of a month’s wages for a schoolteacher, who would still be able to afford only a handful of such commodities (Kallendorf 1999: 157). Thus while books indeed gradually became more affordable over the following centuries, Virgil nevertheless retained a privileged place in the libraries of the rich and powerful. For example a copy of the first printed edition of the Aeneid, by the famous Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, went into the libraries of two English noblemen, Sir John H. Thorold (1734-1815) and James L. Lindsay, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres (1847-1913), before ending up in the collection of the American financier John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) (Kallendorf and Wells 1998: 78-9, no. 36). And another famous edition of Virgil, printed by the Birmingham printer John Baskerville in 1757, was actually financed by a subscription in which nobles such as the Earl of Leicester, influential individuals from the church or state establishment such as the Rev. William George, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and members of the commercial or cultural elite like ‘‘Ben. Franklin Esq. of Philadelphia, FRS’’ put up the publication costs of the book. Even as late as the beginning of the twentieth century, wealthy individuals such as Junius S. Morgan (1867-1932), the nephew of the financier, devoted considerable time and expense to collecting editions of Virgil - in this case, several hundred of them, now at the Princeton University Library.
Obviously there is a variety of reasons why the rich and powerful were drawn to the Aeneid, ranging from personal taste to a peer-induced consensus about what was fashionable, but in the end Virgil’s poetry occupied a more central place in western culture than other classical texts at least in part because the story it told was widely interpreted as the archetypal pattern for the very establishment and diffusion of that culture. Aeneas left his homeland and traveled westward, taking possession of a new land and bringing civilization to it as he merged his countrymen with the indigenous inhabitants. This is part of what makes western culture distinctive - most other civilizations do not trace their beginnings to a journey - and since educated people for two millennia knew the story of the Aeneid, they naturally returned to it again and again as one great power succeeded another, anchoring the rise and fall of new empires in the same Trojan myth. Thus by the thirteenth century, the English could claim that their more direct descent from Aeneas should give them authority over the Franks; among the Franks, however, the noble rulers of Boulogne, Flanders, and Orleans and the cities of Paris, Rheims, Tours, Metz, Nimes, Narbonne, Troyes, Toulouse, and Clermont all claimed Trojan origins. When the Europeans exported their empires abroad, they glorified their successes in poems such as Luis de Camoens’s Os Lusiados, a modern epic that was clearly constructed in imitation of the Aeneid (Waswo 1997: 1-11, 60-1, 82-4). The early American settlers envisioned their experience in the same terms, so that Benjamin Tompson’s New Englands [sic] Crisis, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, and Joel Barlow’s Columbiad present this westward cultural movement as well in reference to the Aeneid (Shields 2001: 30-7, 5671, 255-8). During this period, advances in scholarship led eventually to the recognition that the Trojan legend was myth, not fact, but the archetype retained its appeal so long as it remained at the center ofthe educational experience of the elite (Waswo 1997: 119-26).
Indeed, as cultural power moved from one center to the next, political authority continued to rest on explicitly Virgilian foundations. When the empire in Rome, for example, was transformed into the Holy Roman Empire in Aachen, Charlemagne took for himself Aeneas’ epithet of pius (‘‘pious’’), Alcuin described the emperor’s goals with a Virgilian phrase, parcere subiectis (‘‘to spare the conquered’’; Aen. 6.853), and Einhard wrote a biography of Charlemagne in which he described the emperor as a new Aeneas. Several centuries later, when Dante dreamed of an imperial power that would bring peace to the warring city-states of Italy, he turned to Henry VII as the legitimate heir of Aeneas and argued his position with Virgilian rhetoric. When the Holy Roman emperorship passed to the Hapsburgs, its Virgilian iconography was transferred as well. Leone Leoni’s bronze statue of Charles V, for example, depicts him as a second Aeneas, victorious over a conquered Fury, and the imperial palace in Genoa was decorated with a series of tapestries illustrating the Aeneid, woven to the designs of Perino del Vaga. Philip II in turn associated the lion in the Spanish royal arms with the insignia of the Trojan kings, so that the Hapsburgs assumed Aeneas’ piety when they took up his lion shield; and Philip had the phrase from the Aeneid in which Jupiter prophesies an all-powerful empire in Rome, imperium sine fine dedi (‘‘I have established an empire without end,’’ Aen. 1.279), inscribed on his funeral catafalque in Seville (Tanner 1993: 61-2, 92-3, 113, 115-16, 198-202, 204).
This imperial iconography rested on Christian foundations as well, with the emperor being associated with both priest and king in Old Testament terms. Here, too, the Aeneid provided supporting material, for early on, Virgil was baptized into the new Christian faith. In the fourth century ce, the emperor Constantine gave an address to an ecclesiastical assembly in which he associated the nova progenies (‘‘new seed of man’’) in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue with Christ, Virgil’s virgo (‘‘virgin’’) with Mary, the establishment of a new Golden Age on earth with the resurrection of Christ and the institution of baptism, and so forth. In some form this interpretation was accepted by Proba, Ambrose, Prudentius, Augustine, Abelard, and Dante, who wrote in Purgatory 22.64-73 that the Fourth Eclogue caused the pagan poet Statius to convert secretly to Christianity. Virgil, in other words, was a poeta theologus, a prophet ofsorts who, as poet, attained some measure oftheological understanding through inspiration. Different writers saw this process working in somewhat different ways. Cristoforo Landino, for example, cited passages from Job, the Psalms, and the Gospel of John as parallels to lines from Book 6 of the Aeneid, which told of Aeneas’ descent to the Underworld, but in the end he concluded that the ‘‘old theology’’ of the ancients was not precisely the same as the ‘‘new theology’’ of Christianity (Kallendorf 1999: 95-115). Landino’s commentary, however, was folded into a commentary by Giovanni Fabrini (first published in 1575-6) which went even further than his source in uniting the two streams of theology. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, especially in Germany, one could occasionally still read that spiritual affinities between Virgil and Christianity bring ‘‘us back to the old view that Virgil, like Isaiah, was a real prophet of Christ’’ (Kallendorf 1999: 103 n. 35; Ziolkowski 1993: 77-88).
Virgil’s place at the center of the educational curriculum for almost two thousand years also in the end reinforced the dominant political and social values of those who read his poetry. For one thing, from the early Middle Ages through the end of the Renaissance and beyond, the language of international affairs and the church was Latin, so that a major educational goal for the upper classes was to be able to attain the facility in Latin on which professional advancement rested. If we examine what students wrote in the copies of the
Aeneid that they used as school texts during this period, we can clearly see them struggling to learn basic Latin vocabulary and grammar, clarifying nuances of correct usage, unraveling syntax, building their vocabulary through study of etymologies, and identifying the rhetorical figures of speech so they could write an elegant Latin of their own. Other marginal notes sometimes reflect the effort to move beyond learning the language to scrutinizing the text for its insight into behavior and morality. In most cases individual passages such as ‘‘discite iustitiam moniti et non temnere divos’’ (‘‘be warned, learn justice and not to scorn the gods,’’ Aen. 6.620) are underlined, in preparation for transfer to a commonplace book in which similar sentiments can be retrieved upon suitable occasions in the future. The lessons behind such underlinings and references are clear: work hard for God, country, and what is right, then accept what cannot be changed as part of divine justice (Kallendorf 1999: 31-61). These passages in turn became the subjects of emblems, in which phrases from Virgil like ‘‘pietas filiorum in parentes’’ (‘‘the piety of children toward their parents’’; Aen. 2.706) and ‘‘audentes fortuna iuvat’’ (‘‘fortune assists the bold,’’ Aen. 10.284) are accompanied by appropriate pictures (Fagiolo 1981: 253-4). Both content and pedagogy might seem deliberately calculated to instill passivity into generations of students, who among other things learned to sit still for hours on end through tedious line-by-line commentary and banal moralizing, but this, in the end, also served the interests of the state. As Robert Graves has noted, it was precisely these qualities that ‘‘first commended him [Virgil] to government circles, and have kept him in favour ever since’’ (quoted in Ziolkowski 1993: 99).
The Aeneid, in short, served for almost two thousand years as a vehicle through which the powerful elites of Europe visualized the culture they wanted and brought that culture into being. That is not to say that the poem had no impact on the other 90 percent of the population, but we must be careful how we define that impact. Beginning from a romantic premise about the separateness and purity of popular culture, Domenico Comparetti wrote a classic study of Virgil in the Middle Ages in which he claimed that medieval Naples preserved popular legends about Virgil, who was associated with magic, talismans, and supernatural events. Modern research has largely discredited this claim, showing instead that here, as elsewhere, much of popular culture is derived from learned sources, once (or more) removed (Pasquali 1981: xv-xxxiv). Thus there is evidence that the common people indeed knew something about the Aeneid, but the poem actually served as a bridge of sorts between rich and poor. In some cases a Latin text served this function. For example, one of the most famous of the early editions of Virgil, edited by Sebastian Brant and printed by Johannes Gruninger in 1502, contains a short poem at the end that suggests that the illustrations in the book were added to make it accessible to those who lacked fluency in Latin (Patterson 1987: 104-5). In other cases, a translation linked the world of Latin learning to those who could read, but in the vernacular only, for from the Renaissance on, the Aeneid was also available in good translations, a number of which were prepared by poets who were well regarded in their own right: Annibal Caro in Italy; Clement Marot and Joachim Du Bellay in France; Enrique de Villena, Fray Luis de Ledn, and Gregorio Hernandez de Velasco in Spain; and Gavin Douglas, Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey), and John Dryden in England. And when Philip II traveled throughout the Hapsburg territories in pursuit of the title of Holy Roman Emperor, his courtiers prepared a series of triumphal arches in Antwerp that presented him as the heir of Aeneas. This series may well have been pitched initially to the city’s ruling elite, but the main point would hardly have been lost on the crowds (Tanner 1993: 135-7). Similarly both Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana present arguments in the vernacular about whether Dido remained chaste after the death of her husband Sychaeus, suggesting once again that while the details would presumably resonate with the learned, something of Virgil’s story nevertheless must have been known to those with only a rudimentary education, indeed even to the illiterate who visited the Globe Theatre and listened to chivalric romances read aloud by others.
To say that the Aeneid served as a bridge between those at the center of power and those on the peripheries, however, is not to claim that the rich and powerful simply used the poem to silence all ideological opposition to the status quo. Indeed, while most reactions to the poem confirm the assertion that the Aeneid reinforced the educational, religious, and political values that its elite readers found reflected there, there is significant evidence that Virgil’s poem also helped a handful of readers and imitators articulate their opposition to the power structures of their day. Today such readers follow in the footsteps of the so-called ‘‘Harvard School,’’ an influential group of critics who hear Virgil speaking in two voices, those of personal loss as well as public achievement. That is, when we listen to Dido and Turnus as well as Aeneas, we hear failures as well as successes - of Aeneas, of the Augustan order, and of human nature in general and its ability to reach its goals. Readers like this, however, can be found as far back as Augustan Rome, when Ovid produced a notoriously irreverent version of the Aeneid that dissolves Virgil’s ideological pretensions in irony and indetermination (Thomas 2001: 74-83).
In the fourteenth century, Petrarch rebuked Aeneas first for being a traitor, then a worshiper of false gods, and finally for not actually being pius (‘‘pious’’) as he should have been, thereby challenging Virgil’s poem as a proper authority for religious and political activity (Kallendorf 1999: 394-5). At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan used the figure of Dido to articulate a female voice that suggests that from her perspective, male values and priorities look very different indeed (Desmond 1994: 195224). In the next century, Alonso de Ercilla wrote an epic in imitation of the Aeneid, La Araucana, which ostensibly casts the Spanish invaders of Chile as the victorious Trojans but which also, like its model, shows great sympathy for the indigenous warriors defending their land, thereby calling into question both the Spanish imperial enterprise and the Roman one on which it was based (Kallendorf 2003). Similarly, The Tempest repeats the Virgilian pattern of westward colonization, but again, Shakespeare’s play uses its Virgilian subtext to raise disturbing questions about exactly what gives an invader the right to displace Caliban, or Turnus, for that matter (Tudeau-Clayton 1998: 194-244).
It is important to acknowledge that the Aeneid raised doubts about the legitimacy of the cultural and political order in the minds of some of its readers over the centuries. More often, however, it was appropriated by churchmen, educators, and rulers, who found in it a pattern for the civilization they spent their lives constructing.
World History
