Hans Zimmermann brings up something that has often troubled me. Do the
Augustan poets imagine time as linear or cyclical?
I tell my students that time in the Aeneid is a spiral, in which
situations (a) repeat themselves (b) on a scale of increasing magnitude.
E.g., Hercules vs. Cacus --> Aeneas vs. Turnus --> Octavian vs. Mark
Antony. In the first iteration, the stakes are small: just some cows. In
the last iteration, the stakes are high: nothing less than lordship of
the known world.
If this is right, then time has structure (the circle) but also progress
(the line). And mostly I am content to leave it at that. What troubles
me are the ruined cities, founded by Saturn and Janus, that Evander
points out to Aeneas when they are wandering through the area that will
become downtown Rome. What is the purpose of these ruined cities (which
are mentioned only briefly)? Are they a prophecy of what Rome will come
to in the end? In which case there is not going to be much progress
after all...
I don't think you have to read it that way: for me (and perhaps for
Virgil also) ruins are romantic as well as melancholy, because they
connect us with the past. Insofar as they are ruins, they are monitory.
"Where is the horse and rider? / Where is the horn that was blowing?"
And so on. But ruins are also remnants. And they invite continuation, in
a way that the finished monument, intact and imposing, does not.
There is a similar puzzle at the end of Met. XV: will the Golden Age of
Augustus really last forever, or will it give way to the Changefulness
that Pythagoras has just finished saying (at the beginning of Met. XV)
is the abiding principle of the universe?
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Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org david@virgil.org
English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
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