THE SEEKERS

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Still the reach for the past was passionate and relentless. Myth, born in community tradition preserved and embellished by bards singing heroic epics, survived as a fertile form of literature. It produced its own classics tying past to future. The Romans had known writing since the seventh or sixth century B.C., and their pontiffs, guardians of the sacred books, had begun keeping archives. And this helps explain the poverty of Roman national myths, just as the rise of literacy in Greece had brought there the decline of the spontaneity of the heroic bards. In Rome the arts of oratory had developed and been celebrated by Cicero, under the republic. By the second century B.C. the new career of man of letters had been born. The full-time writers now depended on the patronage of the great families. When Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 B.C., power was concentrated in him as princeps, though republican forms survived. This did not call him a monarch, yet set him above all other citizens. The name Augustus was conferred on him in 27 B.C. The Augustan Age would be fertile of the great Latin writers—Horace, Ovid, and others. This new Roman Empire called for a new national literature, which soon would appear.

  The hero of this re-creation was Virgil (70-19 B.C.). Like most of the great Roman writers, he was not born in Rome. He came from a respectable but not prominent family in what was still called Cisalpine Gaul near Mantua, not far from Venice. Educated at Cremona and Milan, Virgil then studied in Rome before returning to his Mantuan farm. There he began composing his Eclogues in 43 B.C. After his farm was confiscated during the civil wars, he lived for a while in Rome, where the powerful Maecenas (born between 74 and 64 B.C.) introduced him to the emperor Augustus. Maecenas himself had literary ambitions and was the patron of a literary circle that gathered in his mansion on the Esquiline hill. Virgil’s Eclogues, a Latin adaptation of Theocritus’ Greek pastorals, attracted the attention of Maecenas, who was close to Augustus. Maecenas may have suggested the subject of Virgil’s next work, the Georgics (from Greek georgos, “farmer”), a didactic poem of two thousand lines on the model of Hesiod’s Works and Days on agriculture, which Virgil dedicated to him.

  Maecenas tried to persuade the poets in his stable to write epics in praise of his friend Augustus. Virgil took up his suggestion and spent eleven years composing the Aeneid, his epic of the wanderings of Aeneas. When Virgil had nearly finished his epic, he traveled to the East to verify his descriptions of sites in the poem. He fell ill en route, died, and was buried in Naples. Virgil’s project had aroused Augustus’ interest. The emperor had asked to see parts of it as it was written, and Virgil read portions to Augustus and his family in 23 B.C. Augustus appeared to see it as the epic of his vision of Roman grandeur. The work was never revised to Virgil’s satisfaction. It was said that as he was dying Virgil ordered the manuscript destroyed, but this was countermanded by Augustus himself.

  Virgil had led the life of a devoted man of letters, seeking perfection in his writing. He spent his life in poetry, he never married, never held a military or political position. The first half of his life he was a retiring scholar. After his poetry had made him famous, he won the friendship of leading Romans. But he never lost the awe of Rome that he felt from his youth as a provincial, an outsider. In the first Eclogue, one of his earliest poems, the visiting shepherd Tityrus reports:

  The city, Meliboeus, they call Rome,

  I simpleton, deemed like this town of ours. . . .

  Comparing small with great; but this as far

  Above all other cities rears her head

  As cypress above pliant osier towers. (trans. James Rhoades)

  Although the Aeneid shows signs of not having been finally revised, it still survived as a model of Latin style. Just as Homer was the educator of Greece, Quintilian recommended that Virgil’s works should be the basis of the Roman education. For all the centuries since, students of the classics have been enchanted by Virgil’s epic of the adventures of Aeneas. In the Middle Ages, Virgil was Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory toward Paradise. And the Aeneid would provide Milton his model for Paradise Lost. Translation of Virgil has invited the talents of English poets from John Dryden to William Morris, C. Day Lewis and Robert Fitzgerald.

  Myth, which had been the spontaneous accumulation of oral tradition over centuries, in Virgil’s hands now became literature—the vehicle of nations and empires. He turned the kudos of myth to the needs of the new emperor Augustus and the grandeur of expanding Rome. It would have been difficult to write an epic with Augustus himself as the hero. Nor was the Battle of Actium, in which Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra in a naval battle, somehow an appealing theme. There had been very little fighting. It might have seemed absurd to feature the gods in such recent events. And perhaps there were too many suicides for a heroic epic. Antony had committed suicide on the false report of Cleopatra’s suicide. Then Cleopatra, failing to seduce Octavian, and fearing being forced to adorn his triumph in Rome, did the same, while Egypt was added to the Roman Empire.

  Octavian celebrated three triumphs and closed the temple of Janus to signal the restoration of peace throughout the Roman world. The Homeric bards, who sang of ancient times, had little fear of contradiction. But Virgil had taken on an epic foreshadowing the present and the future. Virgil once confessed in a letter that he must have been mad to attempt it. How to create a credible myth—in literature that would celebrate Roman virtues, encompass all Italy, and prophesy the glory of Augustan Rome? To do that while satisfying the envy and amour propre of his own age was an achievement. And at the same time to create an epic of pathos and tragedy that would long outlast the Roman Empire and delight generations who knew no Actium and cared nothing for Antony, Cleopatra, or Octavian. This was the Aeneid, Virgil’s way of seeking meaning in the empire—encompassing past, present, and future.

  Virgil succeeded in this first national epic by drawing on the Homeric epics, proven over centuries. It would have been folly not to build on themes so long tested. So he found ways to adapt the themes of a preliterate heroic age to the aspirations of a world-reaching empire. But how tie the imperial future to a mythic past? A secondary figure in the Iliad, Aeneas, son of Anchises and Aphrodite (Venus) and a member of the younger branch of the royal family of Troy in disfavor with Priam, gave him his clue. In the Iliad “The shaker of the earth Poseidon” predicted that “the might of Aeneas (Aineias) shall be lord over the Trojans and his sons’ sons, and those who are born of their seed hereafter.” Aeneas was thus the one legendary Trojan who had a promising future. While Romans naturally looked to Greek legends for their founding epic, in a time when they were conquering Greece they preferred a hero from among the enemies of Greece. The image of the Trojan Aeneas, refugee from Greek brutality, with his father Anchises on his back and leading his son Ascanius by the hand, filled the prescription. In the Iliad, Aeneas is said to have been respected equally with Hector and to have been honored like a god. While his recorded deeds are not heroic, Aeneas is noted for his piety, a conspicuous Roman virtue. Roman pietas meant not mere religious piety, but devotion to father and mother and the gods and to the grand destiny of Rome. By Virgil’s time there was already a legend of Aeneas’ flight from Troy with his ancestral gods (Penates), of his wanderings and his founding of cities. Towns with names resembling Aeneas or with temples of Venus claimed him as their founder. The Sicilian Greek historian Timaeus in the fourth century B.C. had mentioned Aeneas as the founder of Lavinium on the coastal plains of the Tiber, from which settlers were said to have come to found Alba Longa, birthplace of Romulus and Remus, about twenty miles from the future site of Rome. Drawing on these and other legends, Virgil composed the Aeneid.

  While inspired by Homer, Virgil was wonderfully free in adapting his models. He reversed the order of the Homeric story. He made the Odyssey his model for his first half, starting with six books on the wanderings of his hero Aeneas, after his flight from Troy (his Odyssey). The next six books (his Iliad) was a saga of battle scenes of Aeneas enlisting allies and founding Rome. An
d he reenacts Homeric themes in an exhilarating Roman manner. When Ulysses visited the Underworld, the world of the dead, he saw the shades of his mother and his fellow Greeks killed at Troy or on their way home, along with heroes of the mythic past. Similarly, Virgil’s Aeneas in the Underworld, guided by his father, sees the heroes of the Roman future. While the canny Ulysses personifies the bold Greek seafaring adventurer, Aeneas personifies pietas, the Roman morality of discipline and duty that built a world-encompassing empire.

  At the same time Virgil depicts the tragic choices that were the price of Roman destiny—personal sacrifices like Aeneas’ abandonment of Dido. The Roman destiny was also a costly choice—to turn away from the gentler Greek tasks of art and philosophy to the hard tasks of government and empire. As Anchises prophesies to Aeneas in the Underworld:

  Others will cast more tenderly in bronze

  Their breathing figures, I can well believe,

  And bring more lifelike portraits out of marble;

  Argue more eloquently, use the pointer

  To trace the paths of heaven accurately

  And accurately foretell the rising stars.

  Roman, remember by your strength to rule

  Earth’s peoples—for your arts are to be these

  To pacify, to impose the rule of law,

  To spare the conquered, battle down the proud. (Aeneid, Fitzgerald trans.)

  So Virgil’s national epic takes the form of myth and prophecy. “To these I set no bounds in space or time,” declares Jupiter, “I have given them rule without end.” Which is fulfilled in Virgil’s time, as Anchises foresaw in the Underworld:

  Turn your two eyes

  This way and see this people, your own Romans.

  Here is Caesar, and all the line of Iulus,

  All who shall one day pass under the dome

  Of the great sky: this is the man, this one,

  Of whom so often you have heard the promise

  Caesar Augustus, son of the deified,

  Who shall bring once again an Age of Gold

  To Latium, to the land where Saturn reigned

  In early times. (Aeneid, Fitzgerald trans.)

  In the Middle Ages Virgil would have a new mythic appeal. In his fourth Eclogue (written 40 B.C.) he had recalled the Sibyl’s prophecy:

  The ages’ mighty march begins anew.

  Now comes the virgin, Saturn reigns again:

  Now from high heaven descends a wondrous race.

  Thou on the newborn babe—who first shall end

  That age of Iron, bid a golden dawn

  Upon the broad world . . .

  Shalt free the nations from perpetual fear.

  This came to be called the Messianic Eclogue and was said to contain imagery reminiscent of the Bible. It is likely that Virgil was referring to the expected child of Antony and Octavia. But this and other supposedly prophetic passages earned Virgil his medieval reputation as seer and magician, and his role as Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory.

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  Thomas More’s New Paths to Utopia

  The Age of Discovery of continents and oceans was also an age of European self-discovery. The science of society was no longer channeled into Aristotelian paths. New ways of thinking about society would leave their permanent mark on ways of seeking. The wide spectrum of novelty was revealed in the lives and works of two antithetic brilliant Renaissance contemporaries, Seekers from opposite sides of Europe. The saintly Englishman Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) in his fantasy of Utopia (1516) gave a name and a new form to the poetry of politics, to the search for the ideal community. At the same time the Italian Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) in The Prince (written in 1512) gave birth to a modern science of politics and nations.

  More spoke from the limbo between the medieval Christian and the modern ways of seeking. Son of a prominent lawyer and judge, he was sent to Oxford and then trained in law at Lincoln’s Inn. Tempted toward the priesthood, he decided instead to pursue the law as a profession. But he remained pious, prayed regularly, fasted on the holidays. He even wore a hair shirt, and seemed to be preparing himself for martyrdom. He became a good friend of Erasmus, who while he was More’s houseguest wrote his Praise of Folly (Encomium moriae), and dedicated it to More with a title which was a pun on the name of More.

  More’s Utopia, in Latin, which was still the international language of the learned in Europe, was printed in Louvain in 1516, under Erasmus’ supervision. The word “Utopia” (from Greek, “nowhere”) was invented by More for his classic political fantasy, which would become a model for many others in succeeding centuries. Cast as a traveler’s tale, it bore the unmistakable mark of the Age of Discovery. The mythical narrator, Raphael Hythloday, had gone to America with Vespucci, whose travels had been published in 1507. When Vespucci sailed back to Europe, Hythloday preferred to stay on the ideal island, discovered by one of Vespucci’s crew. More uses the dialogue, the dramatic structure of Plato’s Republic, for the first half of his tale. In search of the ideal society, More gives over the first part of his book to a survey of the evils of European society in his time. The second part describes life on the island of Utopia off the coast of America.

  More’s Utopia is an idealized version of the medieval monastic life. Its main feature is the communal ownership of property (also found in Plato’s Republic). “In other places men talk very literally of the common wealth, but what they mean is simply their own wealth; in Utopia, where there is no private business, every man zealously pursues the public business.” “Though no man owns anything, everyone is rich.” They hold “precious metals” up to scorn in every conceivable way, and make their chamber pots of gold. A national system of education gives women the same education as men.

  The invading king, Utopus, had found the island easy to conquer “because the different sects were too busy fighting one another to oppose him, . . . he decreed that every man might cultivate the religion of his choice, and might proselytize for it, provided he did so quietly, modestly, and rationally and without bitterness toward others. If persuasions failed, no man was allowed to resort to abuse or violence, under penalty of exile or enslavement.” The king Utopus, “because he suspected that God perhaps likes various forms of worship and has therefore deliberately inspired different people with different views,” allowed the widest toleration. “The only exception he made was a positive and strict law against any person who should sink so far below the dignity of human nature as to think that the soul perishes with the body, or that the universe is ruled by mere chance, rather than divine providence.”

  The “justice of the Utopians,” unlike that of Europe, did not reward noblemen or goldsmiths or moneylenders who made their living “by doing either nothing at all or something completely useless to the public” while laborers who did the necessary work were treated like beasts of burden. The book appealed at once to the community of impecunious humanists, and was soon translated into French (1550) and English (1551).

  More’s fanciful imagination somehow did not prevent his success at the bar. He entered the service of the king, and championed Erasmus’ program of the Christian humanists, the study of the Greek classics, the Bible, and the Church Fathers. Henry VIII appointed him Lord Chancellor in 1529 in place of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey when Wolsey failed to secure the king’s divorce from Catherine. But this was as far as More would go in indulging the whims of Henry VIII. When More refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn after the divorce from Catherine, he was a marked man. He was included in a bill of attainder, and continued to refuse to swear to the whole Act of Succession, which would have denied the supremacy of the pope and have made Henry VIII the head of the Church.

  More never lost his orthodox Catholic faith, and despite his wife’s pleas, he refused the conciliation with Henry VIII that would have saved his life. Found guilty of treason, he was sentenced to be “drawn, hanged, and quartered,” but instead he was beheaded in 1535. His courage and good humor at his execution became prov
erbial. “See me safe up,” he said to the lieutenant, “and for my coming down let me shift for myself.” More blindfolded himself. As he put his head on the block he moved his beard aside, since, he said, it had done no offense to the king.

  More declared that he was not dying for treason but “in the faith and for the faith of the Catholic Church, the king’s good servant and God’s first.” Erasmus praised him as a man “whose soul was more pure than any snow.” He was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1935 as Saint Thomas More. And he was immortalized in Erasmus’s phrase as omnium horarum homo, translated as “A Man for All Seasons” in a popular play and film (in 1966) by Robert Bolt. Other English Catholics have shared G. K. Chesterton’s adoration of him as “the greatest Englishman, or at least the greatest historical character in English history.”

  * * *

  While the waning Catholic faith around him led Saint Thomas More to seek his ideal community not in the monastery but in a mythical island of the New World, in Italy the worldly ambitions of the Church would provide the laboratory for a new political science.

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