Rosemary Grayston
Sat, 23 Sep 2006 11:07:54 -0700
Useful observations! A few comments -1. There was racism in the ancient world but no Darwinism, so Social Darwinism, the organising idea of racism 1870-1940 (approx), was not present. There were relevant religion-tinged ideas: of bloodfeud, of superior lineage and of militaristic contempt for those who lose battles. Just as sympathetic characters like Dido may wish to treat members of other races 'nullo discrimine' the characters who most sharply represent these versions of racism - Neoptolemus, Iarbas and Numanus - are unattractive. Iarbas, who speaks of Aeneas and the Trojan race with such scorn, seems to be Aeneas' relative, indeed his wicked uncle, since his father is Hammon - Jupiter in his African aspect. 2. Among the divine characters Juno, with her 'gens inimica' and 'heu stirpem invisam!' seems to drive the action along with her deep-set anger towards the race of Troy. Jupiter by contrast makes a point of saying that he is king of all and must be fair to all. But in the end it seems to be his own deep schemes that set the scene for generations of violent expansion of Roman power and produce the horrible alienation of Rome and Carthage. We know from the reflections in Geo that Jupiter's deepest principle is that there can be no easy way to constructive results. I think we can see how V fears that Roman universalism, for which Jupiter stands, and which is its way a noble rejection of racism, may tie itself in the same knots that seem to tie Jupiter himself in the narrative of Aen.. 3. We know that Roman universalism did in the end have enormous success, not easily matched elsewhere in history. Peter Heather in his recent 'Fall of the Roman Empire' notes how those who lived through the Fall just couldn't believe it was happening. So what went wrong? It still seems surprising that an institution with such enormous resources and such vast support from all classes of so many races was crumpled, as it was, by a few Gothic warlords. V's fearful references at the end of G1 to the Germanic tribes, listening to the sound of arms echoing across all their skies, suggests that he thought that universalism had limits that it would not quickly cross. 4. On the eastern frontier, it is interesting that V evidently responded, in E4, to the Jewish Third Sibylline Oracle, which to a Roman might have been quite menacing, and may have been rewarded with a guarded compliment in the eleventh of that strange oracular series. - Martin Hughes ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Wilson-Okamura" <david@virgil.org>
To: <mantovano@virgil.org> Sent: Friday, September 15, 2006 4:58 AM Subject: Re: VIRGIL: Nefarious conjugals with fortunate race
On 9/14/06, Martin Hughes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:I rather like to think (which is no reason to think) that V understood, in arational way, that the Empire was bound to receive an intellectual contribution from a certain variety of races: as indeed it was.Virgil talks about the richness of Rome's mixed heritage at several points in the narrative. The most obvious contribution is linguistic: in bk. 12, Jupiter prophies that the Trojan conquerors will forget their own language and speak Latin (bk. 12). Certain military customs are also derived from the latini, such as naval trophies made from beaks of ships (bk. 7). Race mixing seems to be the norm everywhere. Dido comes from what is now Lebanon, Aeneas from what is now Turkey. Both are expected to marry with the local nobility, Dido in Africa, Aeneas in Italy. Pallas, we are told in book 8, has a Greek father and a Sabine mother. For Virgil, this was personal. Mantua, where he grew up, didn't get citizenship until Virgil was in his teens. That's the history. The fiction, in Virgil's epic, is that Tuscany has always been part of Rome, because its armies were allied with Aeneas. Mantua, in particular, is described as a racial melting pot, a "three-fold race" (10.202, gens...triplex), "rich in ancestry" (10.201, diues auis). ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
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