I am currently translating a poem by Sannazaro on Cumae. The last time I gave a reading of my poetry in Italy was in September last year, at a festival in Mantua. One of the poems I read was ‘Laureate’s Block’, another poem which got me hounded by the same ignorant Daily Mail journalists. ‘Laureate’s Block’ is a poem I wrote for the Guardian, deliberately designed to ruin any chance I might have had of being made Poet Laureate and declaring my republican sentiments with as obvious, if versified, clarity as your first president’s declaration that he was ‘a Royalist in politics, an Anglo-Catholic in religion and a classicist in literature’. It’s probably being a republican that also makes me, like Shelley, and unlike T. S. Eliot, a great admirer of the iconoclastic Lucan, notwithstanding his subversive vandalising of Virgil, and of that even greater republican poet, John Milton, whose epic probably owes more to Lucan’s Pharsalia than to Virgil’s Aeneid. I have a certain wariness or non-laureate’s block when I think that Virgil was probably the first poet to set the style of laureate verse.
There were other poems I read in Mantua which might also identify me as an ‘atheist in religion’, and of course, this makes me unsympathetic to the posthumous press-ganging of Virgil into Christianity as ‘anima naturaliter Christiana’, something I also associate with your first president. It is amazing the lengths these posthumous proselytisers will go to, even with less malleable material than Virgil. Franz Werfel (1890–1945), the German dramatist and poet who translated Euripides’ Trojan Women just before the outbreak of the First World War, could even see in Hecuba an anticipation of the passion of Jesus Christ. ‘And thus we see’, Werfel wrote, ‘the notorious atheist Euripides as a harbinger, a prophet, an early dove of Christianity.’
But most of the poems I read last September in Mantua, republican or atheist as they may well be, all show at least one and one only congruence between your first and your latest poet-president, and that is that I’d also call myself, with some qualifications, ‘a classicist in literature’. Perhaps a classicist who graffitis and vandalises his own carefully wrought edifices and structures. The vandal with the aerosol has to value highly what he desecrates with his daubing, no less than Lord Byron, who chiselled his name on columns at Sunion and Delphi, or Giuseppe Boba (1790), Casper Pinottem (1728), G. Mahiev (1735), CFFB (1737), clearly devotees of different nationalities, who chiselled their names or initials just beneath the lead inlaid laurels on the inscription on Virgil’s tomb in Mergellina.
I also read one poem in Mantua, probably the only one I’ve written in which the influence of Virgil is clear. I will read it at the end of my talk. I didn’t go directly to Mantua from England. I was, coincidentally, on my way back from another long filming journey, after the eleven-week Odyssey across Europe making my film Prometheus. This new film followed the route of the severed head of Orpheus down the Maritsa river, as the Hebrus is now known in Bulgaria, down the Evros, as it’s known in modern Greek, and across the sea to the resting place of the head and the lyre of the poet in Lesbos.
I had a complete Virgil with me, and whenever we could get close enough to the river, and it was not the militarised border zone between Greece and Turkey, from its banks or from a boat on its current I’d declaim:
tum quoque marmorea caput a cervice revulsum
gurgite cum medio portans Oeagrius Hebrus
volveret, Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua,
a miseram Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat,
Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae.
(Georgics 4.523–27)
And even then, when Oeagrian Hebrus spun that head, torn from its marble neck, around in mid-flow, the incorporeal voice and the tongue, now cold, called on Eurydice – ah, poor Eurydice! – as the spirit departed. ‘Eurydice,’ the banks re-echoed, all the way down the stream.
When I tell you that the head that we floated down the river from its cascading source high up in the Rhodopes through Plovdiv, past Didimoticho and Soufli and all the way to Lesbos was modelled from my own head, you will understand the degree of empathy I brought to the project and to what I might say today about Orpheus.
After the poetry reading of last September in the tranquil walled garden of a Mantuan palazzo, I was given dinner by the festival directors in a trattoria which served the local culinary delicacy, which you could translate as ‘ass casserole’ or ‘donkey stew’. As I ate I found myself quoting, though I know it is not by Virgil, from the Copa:
delicium est asinus (26)
In some ways I’d like to think that Virgil had written the Copa, but although it has been described as ‘an elegy bubbling over with the joy of life’, the writer (P. J. Enk) goes on to say that it is ‘too cheerful, however, to allow ascription to Virgil’. It would be good to think that his life was not all poetry and ‘lacrimae rerum’, and that he got out to the taverna now and then. I’ve eaten in La Taverna di Virgilio in Brindisi, near the Scalinata Virgilio, which was a cheerful enough place, even though it is in the town of the poet’s death.
pone merum et talos
the Copa ends;
pereat, qui crastina curat!
mors aurem vellens ‘vivite’ ait, ‘venio’.
‘Live,’ says Death, ‘I’m on my way.’
I’m not much of a gambler, but after the reading I had a taste for Mantuan merum. (I think it was Bianco di Custoza from the hills of Cremona.)
The next morning (or perhaps I should say the morning after, since the day brought me some sobering thoughts), as I’d never been to Mantua before I spent the first of a few days looking round. Because Orpheus was still on my mind after my three-week journey along the Hebrus, I started with the Palazzo Ducale, where the first purely secular Italian drama, the Orfeo of Angelo Poliziano, was played in 1480, and later what is often regarded as the first opera, the Orfeo of Monteverdi, in 1607. Both Orfeos derived from the same Virgilian text I’d carried with me and declaimed along the Hebrus through Bulgaria and Greece. The lament and echo of the Orphic voice lead to the heart of opera; the very metrical repetition of grief and loss is the direct source of plaintive aria.
Around the same time as Poliziano’s Orfeo, the Gonzaga Bridal Room, the Camera degli Sposi, was decorated by Mantegna (1431–1506), and I went, with my binoculars, to examine the ceiling spandrels, which depict Arion of Lesbos astride a dolphin, Orpheus charming a lion, Orpheus charming Cerberos and a Fury, and, finally, a fallen Orpheus, his hand lolling over the spandrel’s border, being brutally clubbed to death by three women. It is this last shocking decoration which inspired Albrecht Dürer, who was in Italy in the 1490s. In Dürer’s etching of the same murder, above the scene of Orpheus being clubbed and battered, there is a banderole looped decoratively in the branches of a tree which reads:
Orfeus der erst Puseran
which can only be translated in its crude hostility as ‘Orpheus the first faggot’. Like the fragments of Phanocles before him (who was known and used by the brilliant Poliziano), Ovid, though not quite so butchly belligerent as Albrecht, has this version of the poet’s murder in Metamorphoses 10:
lle etiam Thracum populis fuit auctor amorem in teneros transferre mares citraque iuventam etatis breve ver et primos carpere flores. (83–5)
Indeed, he was the first amongst the people of Thrace to transfer his love to tender youths, and revel in the fruit of their brief springtime, and early flowering, this side of manhood.
The implication behind the savage dismemberment of Orpheus was that he was ‘unmanly’ in some way, mollis, not durus (‘soft’, not ‘hard’). It may well be the first story that suggests that the practice of poetry is not really a manly activity. At least not this kind of poetry.
Orpheus is the first non-sword-wielding hero in the myths, who either turned to the love of boys or was killed because his grief was excessive, just as the nightingale in the simile in the Georgics sings its grief, and gives us a sense of the art of lamentation considered obsessive in contrast to the world where the durus arator, the ‘harsh plo
ughman’, gets on with the business of cultivation. And the empire-builder with conquest, killing, spoils and triumphs!
The Thrace where Orpheus was born was also the birth-place of Ares, god of war. And for the Greeks the mountains of Thrace always resounded, writes the Bulgarian archaeologist Ivan Mazarov, ‘either with the clash of weapons or the song of the lyre’. Either/or! ‘There is … something about Orpheus that sets him apart from all the other great figures of Greek myth [which] is pre-eminently heroic myth that enshrines martial values: courage, killing, blood-lust …’ All the other great figures of Greek myth, whatever else they may be, are great killers; Orpheus carries with him that essentially powerless power of poetry, as it detaches itself from the heroic mode and in its very detachment becomes dangerously undermining of the martial ideal, as it gives scope for frailty, tenderness, doubt, tears and sorrow. This poetry is not like that of Cretheus, the Trojan bard, killed by Turnus in Aeneid Book 9:
semper equos atque arma virum pugnasque canebat. (777)
He always sang of horses and men at arms and battles.
The arma virum reminds us too much of the opening of the Aeneid itself not to make us wonder why Virgil has his fellow heroic poet die.
The lyre of Orpheus, thrown in the same river as its dismembered player, came with the head to Lesbos, where a non-heroic poetry prospered for the first time into the personal lyric: Terpander, Sappho, Alcaeus, a poetry that liberates itself from the metrical military morale-boosting and tunes itself to something more tender than laureate triumph. The torment of Orpheus bloomed into a tenderness unknown in the heroic world, and impossible to maintain for more than a moment among martial clamour. We shouldn’t forget how brass, the aerea cornua, and percussion drown out the magic lyre of Orpheus in Metamorphoses 11:
Sed ingens
clamor et infracto Berecyntia tibia cornu
tympanaque. (15–17)
But the vast clamour of the Berecyntian flutes of broken horn and the drums.
How can the lyre make itself heard above the din of clashing steel, the killing and screaming?
After the story of Orpheus, Virgil’s Georgics end with a kind of epilogue in which Virgil, you could say, allows us to hear the lyre and the clash of weapons, and seems to give all the glory to the martial sound and fury, casting himself dismissively as ‘studiis florentem ignobilis oti’, ‘flourishing in the pursuits of obscure retirement’, in contrast to Octavian, Caesar magnus, thundering in war and, as victor, giving laws to ‘willing’ nations (though the willingness of the nations might be the first whiff of the laureate spin that colours the Aeneid). The fulminat (‘hurls lightning’) inevitably drowns out the carmina. Art is cast as inglorious compared with triumph and conquest, or, indeed, with the agricultural labour of the durus arator. The final lines you might almost call Virgil’s valediction to the Orphic voice. How does a spirit probably more inclined towards the grief of the nightingale or the sorrow of Orpheus fare among the clash of weapons? Can an Orpheus become a Cretheus? How does this mollities (morbidezza, as Mackail translates it), this tenderness, which carries with it the brand of weakness or effeminacy among the braying trumpets, fare in an imperialist mission where the solemnised advice from the Underworld for future Romans begins:
excudent alii spirantia mollius aera
(Aeneid 6.847)
others will hammer out bronze that breathes with more refinement than ours
though, of course, the Romans would make their own aerea cornua against whose bellicose, rasping notes even the lyre of Orpheus is helpless. The Orphic voice which is mollis, refined, is certainly not a creator of epics. Verse that celebrates Caesar is durus, as Propertius writes to Augustus’ ‘arts czar’ Maecenas, who asks why his poetry is mollis:
nec mea conveniunt duro praecordia versu
Caesaris in Phrygios condere nomen avos. (2.1.41–2)
Nor do I have the stomach to trace Caesar’s name back to Phrygian ancestors in hard enough verse.
What happens to versus when it has to become durus, especially when it is composed by one whose spirit seems to be more essentially mollis? What compromises have to be made if the lyre enters that world willingly and tries to serve both power and the empathetic, tragic, compassionate heart of poetry? It seems the dilemma of the Virgilian imagination in his imperial epic.
On the same day in Mantua after the Palazzo Ducale, with the spirit of the grieving, inconsolable, then battered Orpheus and these thoughts much in my head and with my Virgil in my pocket, I went to look for the statue of the poet this Society is devoted to, in a park off the Piazza Virgiliana. The statue seemed to me, I have to say, a monument more appropriate to a conqueror than to a poet, or to a poet who had to raise a naturally more gentle voice to measure up to the clash of weapons, or be heard above the din of aerea cornua:
aereaque adsensu conspirant cornua rauco. (7.615)
and bronze horns breathe in hoarse assent.
Part of the explanation is that the statue was erected in anticipation of the bimillennial celebrations of Virgil’s birth in 1930, during the dictatorship of Mussolini (1922–43). The statue is raised many metres above the ground, and I had to use my binoculars to have a decent view of the face I was forced to gaze up at in compulsory awe and reverence. The statue is in a declamatory pose, and certainly not reading his work on the same plane as his audience, as I had done in the palazzo the night before. At ground level, beneath the belittling bard, are the coronets of the limescaled sprinklers of two dried-up fountains, not an appropriate symbol for a poet whose Aeneid has been on the curricula of Europe since Caecilius Epirota put him on the syllabus soon after the epic’s publication. There were two used hypodermics in the fountains, a condom and discarded juice cartons.
It is easier to associate the poetry of empire with this imposing figure than the poetry of loss and doubt, and that is probably the point of this particular sculpture, as the rest of the monument makes clearer. Beneath the raised right arm of the declaiming bard is another statue of two men, one, the Roman, with his foot planted triumphantly on the stomach of the other, and on the pedestal, along with more recent red and blue graffiti of gang vendetta and vengeance, is the text from the Aeneid the sculpture is meant to illustrate, and the lines I have no doubt the statue of the bard above was meant to be declaiming:
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes) pacisque imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. (6.851–3)
But you, Roman, learn to rule peoples with your imperial power, for this shall be your skill – to impose the rule of peace, to spare the conquered and subdue the arrogant.
‘Superbi were simply those who’, in the words of de Ste. Croix, ‘refused to submit to Roman domination, and beaten down they were.’
The verb ‘debellare’, ‘subdue’, is, interestingly enough, not used before the Augustan period. The ghost of Anchises is militantly fond of ‘debellare’, as he also uses it when he appears to Aeneas in Book 5 (730 f.), when he tells his son that there is a gens debellanda, a ‘people which must be subdued’, in Latium.
Titus, son of Vespasian, who sacked Jerusalem in ad 70 with appalling carnage, was called Vespasianus Iudaeorum debellator, ‘subduer of Jews’ (Tertullian, Apologeticum 5), and the Vulgate has the word ‘debellator’ coupled, appropriately, with ‘durus’, for which the Authorised Version has ‘fierce man of war’ (Wisdom of Solomon, 18.15). These lines on the pedestal are, said Robert Graves, in one of the most virulently hostile diatribes against Virgil outside the Whigs of the eighteenth century, ‘… a favourite declamation of imperialists who consider themselves heirs of Augustan Rome’.
Certainly prominent among those who considered themselves the heirs of Augustan Rome in more recent times was Mussolini, under whose dictatorship the declaiming bard was erected. ‘Five years from now,’ Mussolini declared on 31 December 1925, ‘Rome must appear in all its splendour: immense, ordered, and as powerful as it was at the time of the first empire, that of Augu
stus.’ Mussolini was called ‘a second Augustus’ by his foreign minister, Dino Grandi, who, as Mussolini’s spin doctor, spoke of his invasion of Ethiopia as Italy’s ‘mission to civilise the black continent’; Mussolini, of course, also heeding the Elysian advice of Anchises inscribed on the monument I was sitting in front of, practised his brand of ‘civilised’ debellare against black superbi in Ethiopia with mustard gas. By 1937, the bimillennial anniversary of the birth of Augustus (63 BC–AD 14), Mussolini’s archaeologists and architects had created the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, with the reconstructed mausoleum of the emperor and the Ara Pacis enclosed in a building by the Tiber where today it is Chiuso per Lavori.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 23