In answer to your first question, there are the Christian allegorizations
of the Aeneid by Fulgentius and by Bernardus Silvestris. There is also
the medieval idea that Rome as the headquarters of the Catholic Church
even after the Roman Empire had crumbled in the West affords a kind of
continuity (with a shift of focus from the temporal to the spiritual) with
the "imperium sine fine" that Virgil had extolled. There is also the
emphasis on _pietas_ in Virgil's hero Aeneas, which makes him easier to
view through a Christian lens than, say, Achilles would have been.
But (to answer the person who first started this thread) I don't
think many readers in the Middle Ages were sensitive to any moral critique
Virgil might possibly have been making of the power-mongering involved in
empire-building. It is twentieth-century readers who seem most conscious
of that aspect of the _Aeneid_. Medieval Christian rulers tend to be
rather triumphalist and aggressive--this all started with Constantine in
the early 4th c.--and are often egged on in this attitude by compliant
churchmen. Pope Gregory the Great actually stated that conquest of pagan
peoples was a Good Thing because it allowed Christian missionaries access
to them; cf. Charlemagne's campaigns in northern Europe and, later, the
Teutonic Knights (an order of military monks) who somehow decided that the
Poles weren't Catholic enough--despite their centuries-long Catholicism--
and that "true Catholicism" would have to be enforced by the sword. It
all comes down to lust for power in the end, of course. Virgil may have
been a sensitive guy full of moral qualms, but that hasn't prevented the
_Aeneid_ from fanning the flames of imperialistic ambition in readers of
all time periods.
Randi Eldevik
Oklahoma State University
On Sun, 12 Sep 1999, David Wilson-Okamura wrote:
> A few questions, relating to the recent thread on Virgil and the Fourth
> Eclogue:
>
> 1. What else, besides the Fourth Eclogue, led medieval readers to view
> Virgil as a proto-Christian prophet? How different is the medieval view
> from that of, say, the one outlined by Broch in _The Death of Virgil_ (1945)?
>
> Judging from the information that I receive from new subscribers, I'd guess
> that at least a fifth of those who join this group do so because they want
> to learn more about Virgil and Dante. Has anyone formed an opinion yet of
> either of the following:
>
> 2. Vol. 1 of the new Lectura Dantis (California), ed. Mandelbaum, Oldcorn,
> and Ross
>
> 3. The Durling/Martinez Inferno (rev.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, &c.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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