When I last saw it recently, a fig tree with small green fruit was growing out of a fissure in the Res Gestae. Mussolini subsidised editions of the Aeneid to help promote his new ‘Augustan’ imperialism. It is, unfortunately, inescapably true that it is all too easy to co-opt Virgil into these enterprises. Especially a Virgil like this statue I was trying to crane my neck to look at declaiming Aeneid 6.851–3 to the air way above my head. Definitely declaiming those very lines. The pose says it all.
It was a beautiful September day in Mantua, and I had some hours spare before my next appointment with donkey stew, so I sat on a bench in the park and, dwarfed by the monument, alternately looked at the commemorative image of the declaiming, elevated bard and read his Aeneid 6 for the context for the three lines on the pedestal of the triumphant Roman. The sculpted victor with his sandalled foot on his defeated foe has not a shred of parcere subiectis in it. Rather the victor (whose visage, coincidentally or not, bears a close resemblance to Mussolini himself) with his sandal on the guts of the defeated looks out towards the camera or the sculptor like a hunter from the British Raj snapped with his boot on a dead tiger. Scanning the pair from my bench with my binoculars I noticed that the conquered foe beneath the Roman had a Greek meander pattern on his kilt. Was this, I began to wonder, a conflation of Lucius Mummius, the conqueror of Corinth in 146 BC, and the Italian invader of Corfu in 1923, the first example of the dictator’s violence on an international scale, which Dino Grandi, who became Mussolini’s ambassador to Britain and whom Il Duce would always detest for making him back down over Corfu, called ‘a real contribution to European peace’? That sort of ‘spin’ was typical of the first Augustus too!
‘Sparing the defeated’, which I don’t think was on the mind of the sculpted Mussolini lookalike, is a central proud entry on the marmoreal CV of the crumbling Res Gestae housing the now closed Ara Pacis, which the second Augustus restored in honour of the first. The words are a chiselled sentence I first read in Turkey:
Bella terra et mari civilia externaque toto in orbe terrarum
suscepi, victorque omnibus superstitibus civibus peperci.
I often waged wars on land and sea, civil and foreign, throughout the whole world, and although victorious, I spared all citizens who asked for pardon.
The necessity of sparing is put even more passionately and urgently by Anchises earlier, in the crucial matter of civil conflict rather than foreign domination. At the end of civil war and vendetta someone has to start the process of reconciliation and disarming. It becomes the victor to throw away his sword:
ne, pueri, ne tanta animis adsuescite bella,
neu patriae validas in viscera vertite viris;
tuque prior, tu parce, genus qui ducis Olympo;
proice tela manu, sanguis meus!
(Aeneid 6.832–5)
My sons, don’t allow your souls to become accustomed to such wars, never turn the mighty powers of your fatherland against itself. You be the first to spare others, you, who trace your ancestry to Olympus; cast the weapons from your hand, you who share my blood!
The vehement alliteration of the ‘v’s and ‘p’s is followed by the choking into silence on the broken line, which seems to show Anchises choked and silenced at the sorrow of the Roman Civil War and being unable to continue. I don’t want to get sidetracked into the question of half-lines. We might say that, if it was deliberate, it is a brilliant dramatic device. If it wasn’t, then it shows that Virgil was having trouble with the transition, and it was his own shocked silence, not Anchises’, over what was coming next.
Under the dominating fascistic statue I felt again one of my greatest moments of unease in the Aeneid. Something has always appalled me at how Anchises recovers his didactic composure after his moment of silence by reaching for the inspiring and gloriously triumphant figure of Lucius Mummius, destroyer of Corinth, famous for the Greeks he has butchered. Not one of my heroes! We ‘pass again to triumph’, says R. D. Williams:
Ille triumphata Capitolia ad alta Corintho
victor aget currum, caesis insignis Achivis. (6.836–7)
Dryden has:
Another comes, who shall in triumph ride,
And to the Capitol his chariot guide,
From conquered Corinth, rich with Grecian spoils.
Lucius Mummius Achaicus destroyed Corinth in 146 B.C. If we quote the simple sentences of Pausanias on this great Roman triumph, it is to measure the poeticising against a more prosaic and disturbing reality, and to realise all that is suppressed in the durus versus glorification of triumphant Rome’s vengeance for Troy:
Most of the people found in [Corinth] were massacred by the Romans, and Mummius sold the women and children … The most admired monuments of piety and art he carried off … (7.16)
Not much parcere subiectis here, though I’ll mention the one recorded incident of compassion later.
The myths of Roman clemency have to be maintained for Lucius Mummius as well as for Augustus Caesar, and to compensate at least for the sequestration of these monuments of piety and art something presumably far more inspiring and publicly educative was set up, if the inscription found on a pedestal of what had been an imposing equestrian statue in Olympia is anything to go by:
The city of Elis erected this statue of Lucius Mummius … commander-in-chief of the Romans, on account of his virtue and the kindness which he continues to show to it and to the rest of the Greeks.
The conflation of Lucius Mummius and the Mussolini lookalike, which was hard to ignore as long as I sat in the park, put me in mind of the Italian newspapers that reported how, after Mussolini’s invasion of Greece in 1940, which was a complete flop, ‘the Greeks were welcoming the Italian troops and gratefully accepting the imitation bronze busts of the Duce’.
Not only was the sacked city re-embellished with equestrian statues of its sacker, but, according to Dio Chrysostom, Corinth was the first Greek city to be blessed with that most Roman of institutions, gladiatorial games. Dio goes on to note with horror and disgust that these barbarities then went to Athens itself, where a still visible marble barrier round the orchestra of the theatre of Dionysus shows ‘too plainly the bloody nature of the exhibitions to which that splendid palace of art was degraded’, as Mahaffy puts it.
Brutal and even blasphemous fact in the holy place of spellbinding poetry, but it is, though, an inevitable consequence of the choices made by the durus debellator dramatised by Virgil in the Aeneid. All roads lead to the Colosseum, and to the blood-curdling charade of the death of Orpheus, literally and fatally enacted before 50,000 Romans. In Martial’s De Spectaculis (AD 80) there is an epigram that tells us of Orpheus being literally torn to pieces by a bear in the Colosseum. It is a shocking emblem and blasphemous enactment of where the triumph of durus over mollis (I think inevitably) leads. I have always read it as an elegy for the death of the imagination, and with the imagination the death of compassion:
Quicquid in Orpheo Rhodope spectasse theatro
dicitur, exhibuit, Caesar, arena tibi.
repserunt scopuli, mirandaque silva cucurrit,
quale fuisse nemus creditur Hesperidum.
adfuit immixtum pecori genus omne ferarum
et supra vatem multa pependit avis,
ipse sed ingrato iacuit laceratus ab urso.
haec tamen ut res est facta, ita ficta alia est.
(Epigramma 21 – De Orpheo)
Whatever scene it is said that Mount Rhodope witnessed, that same scene was displayed to you on the arena’s Orphic stage. Rocks crawled and a marvellous wood rushed onwards, like the reputed grove of the Hesperides. Every type of wild animal was there, mingling in the herd, and myriad birds, hovering over the bard. But he fell, gored by an ungrateful bear. This deed was done in fact which elsewhere is done in fiction.
I used the ficta/facta contrast also in a play I staged in a Roman amphitheatre in Carnuntum, on the Danube, between Vienna and Bratislava. I have Commodus say:
Greek bloodshed is all ficta,
ours is facta we Romans really kill the fucking actor.
The road from Lucius Mummius to a mangled Orpheus in the Colosseum is a straight Roman one. How the truly poetic shrivels in triumphalism.
Do the conscience and compassion of Virgil here fall lamentably short in not giving Corinth the poetic equivalent of the temple mural in Carthage that made Aeneas stand and weep? Surely it suppresses the poet’s own sensibility, nurtured as it undoubtedly was on Greek culture and art. What did it cost Virgil personally to suppress those feelings to create the durus versus of Roman triumphalism?
Oddly enough, there is a pertinent anecdote about Lucius Mummius, the destroyer of Corinth and looter of its art. There is, as with Aeneas and the murals of Carthage, a moment of tears. Perhaps here we can find a momentary flash of parcere subiectis. The story is told by Plutarch (Quaestiones Convivales 737a):
At the point of destroying Corinth Mummius collected all children of free birth and asked those who knew their letters to write down a line of poetry in front of him. One of them wrote:
τρὶς μάκαρες Δαναοὶ καὶ τετράκις, οἳ τότ᾽ ὄλοντο
Thrice and even four times blessed were the Danaans who perished then.
(Odyssey 5.306)
Mummius is moved, weeps at the child’s written line from the Odyssey, and spares the family of the child, though all the others, who couldn’t write or couldn’t remember an apposite quotation, are sold into slavery. The durus debellator can’t afford to be mollis for more than a moment. Though capable at times of such feelings, the Roman’s capacity for fierce debellare might be impaired, and the imperial mission jeopardised, if he surrendered to them. The parcere subiectis of Lucius Mummius is a blip in the belligerence. The tears are dried, the city levelled. Aeneas at the very end of the epic is also shown almost surrendering to the kind of compassion he had sensed in the murals of an alien city. By making the helpless Turnus invoke Anchises, Virgil makes us remember what Anchises told Aeneas: parcere subiectis. Aeneas ignores the advice, and the compassion which had made him weep in Carthage is suppressed in him, but awakened in the reader. The ending shows the cost of not learning parcere subiectis. It is a moment when the aerea cornua, the drums and trumpets of empire, are too loud to hear the lyre of compassion, though after the sound and fury of Aeneas killing Turnus we hear the lyre note send the complaining soul off to the shadows.
The unheard or unheeded lyre is the one thrust into the hands of the criminal, who had to enact Orpheus by showing the futility of his lyrical art and being torn to pieces.
Though we cannot expect Virgil to have had Sibylline foresight of Nero and Caligula and Commodus, even though he is credited by some with prophetic insight into the coming of Christ, he would have been aware of what are the momentous consequences of 146 BC, when both Carthage and Corinth were razed to the ground.
In the conflagration of Corinth, like a Titanic forge, such metals as had not been or could not be looted, gold, silver, copper fused together into a new, and highly valued, alloy, which was known from that time on as Corinthium aes. Can we take Corinthium aes as a metaphor for the alloy out of which the durus versus of the Roman epic is made, as something of value from Greece metamorphosed by Roman destruction? Whatever was mollius in the art resmelted in conflagration is only apparent when reworked in flashes, flecks and fragments in the refashioned metal. Instead of giving a quality to the whole work, its melted residues are hammered into a glint or glimpse of something tenderer that once gave a coherence to the whole.
Though Scipio Africanus was a more restrained looter than Mummius, I wonder if it is legitimate to ask if the fresco or set of panels depicting the Trojan wars before which Aeneas stood and wept was carried off to Rome, where its ‘compassion’, as Gavin Douglas has it in his translation of the passage, or its ‘commiseratio calamitatum’, as Ruaeus paraphrases in the edition of Aeneid that John Dryden relied on, might trouble the durus debellator’s conscience for decades to come. Or did it lose all detail in the fierce heat, and did Priam and the suffering Trojans become fused into a new molten alloy, a Carthaginian brass, out of which less compassionate images could be forged and over which no tears need be shed?
What makes the mural in Carthage a different art from almost anything else in the whole Aeneid is that it represents the compassion for the suffering of people who are not kith or kin:
sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi,
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
(1.461–2)
Here too renown brings its own rewards,
There are tears for events and mortal matters touch the heart.
The second line has always been detached from its context to give Virgil a universality that has been used to counter the unease we feel about his propagandist purpose, and to create an Orphic voice singing in descant to the clash of arms. And although I have long believed, like Nicholas Horsfall, that ‘only rank bad Latin can make of these lines a general reflection on the human condition’, it goes on being used in the way it was used last year in the Daily Telegraph by Harry Eyres, who, under a headline saying that Virgil was a ‘writer whose verse can be read as an elegy for the pain of Kosovo’, said that ‘though Virgil does not minimise the blood and sweat needed to complete the huge task of founding the imperial city, what interests him most are the tears … Tears seem to flow on every page …’
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Mr Eyres ought to be careful, as it is also possible to find a parallel in the justification of the domination of Greece as revenge for the Trojan War, almost a millennium before, and Slobodan Milošević’s use of the medieval battle of Kosovo to justify his atrocities.
The much-misused line (‘sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’) is even more profound when considered back in its proper context. The murals which move Aeneas to tears are recent and show compassion for the suffering of people unrelated to the artists and the Carthaginians. Hic etiam, ‘even here’, far from Troy, art shows compassion and empathy, commiseratio calamitatum. That it is Tyrian pity for Trojan woes (as Dryden translates) is an essential part of the effect of the work of art on Aeneas and on us. That the sufferer and the sympathiser are distinctly unrelated is the very essence of the idea of shared humanity and mortality. There are certainly other tears in the Aeneid, but they almost all involve kinship. There are no Roman equivalents of the Carthaginian murals. Such art could induce the debellator perhaps [to] parcere superbis. Official Augustan art is like the Shield of Aeneas or that temple imagined in Georgics 3, with Caesar, as usual, in its centre:
in medio mihi Caesar erit templumque tenebit
(Georgics 3.16)
Caesar will hold central place in my temple
and with the (no doubt looted)
Parii lapides, spirantia signa. (3.34)
Breathing statues made of Parian marble.
None of it is art of which could be said:
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
The drama of the Aeneid’s ending is precisely that struggle between mollis and durus which I had found that morning in Mantegna’s Orpheus. Are we to look at that end like Aeneas looking at the fresco in Carthage, or like Aeneas looking at the moulded figures on his shield? There is a world of difference. You weep at one and carry the other into the clash of weapons, to the sound of the drums and trumpets that drown out the lyre of Orpheus, which I swear I heard softly in my ear as I walked away from the declaiming statue in the Mantuan Park. Was someone at ground level, I wondered, strumming the coronet of the dried-up fountain as I walked along the banks of the Mincio to the place of donkey stew (delicium est asinus)? If the bronze bard heard it too, it might well crumble.
I began by telling you about the poems I read in the Mantuan palazzo singing for my first supper of donkey stew. Another poem I read is probably the only poem I’ve written that I am conscious of being influenced by Virgil. As president of the Classical Association, on 3 November
1987 I wrote my one and only letter to The Times. The correspondence columns had been full of two subjects while I’d been away in Ankara: the future of Latin studies, and the merit and scandal of my poem v. I wrote in my letter that without the years I’d spent studying Latin and Greek, I would never have been able to write v. I can say now that without the years I’ve spent reading Virgil, I could never have written the following poem that I read in Mantua in September and will be reading in Norway tomorrow. It was reprinted recently in The Faber Book of War Poetry (London, 1996), edited by the former Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker. I’m pleased to say that it appears with extracts from Books 1 and 2 of the Aeneid.
It is called ‘The Cycles of Donji Vakuf’. And it’s about my taking my lyre into the clash of weapons in Bosnia. Somewhere in it you will recognise Virgilian images and also, perhaps, the contrast of mollis and durus, and something in the consoling mandolin lost to its player that might remind you briefly of the Orpheus who came with me that September morning in Mantua to look at the statue of Virgil:
We take Emerald to Bugojno, then the Opal route
to Donji Vakuf where Kalashnikovs still shoot
at retreating Serbs or at the sky
to drum up the leaden beat of victory.
Once more, though this time Serbian, homes
get pounded to facades like honeycombs.
This time it’s the Bosnian Muslims’ turn
to ‘cleanse’ a taken town, to loot, and burn.
Donji Vakuf fell last night at 11,
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 24